From Dignitatis Humanae to Magnifica Humanitas: Disarming AI to Protect Freedom of Conscience

Montserrat Gas-Aixendri is a full professor of law and religion at Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (Barcelona, Spain).

This post is a part of our series on Magnifica Humanitas.

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (MH), offers a broad reflection on the challenges that artificial intelligence poses to human dignity, social life, and the future of human coexistence. The document begins from a fundamental premise: the proclamation of the Gospel cannot overlook the concrete lives of peoples and the new forms of injustice that affect human beings. Leo XIII had already demonstrated this in Rerum Novarum, inaugurating a tradition of Christian social thought attentive to the transformations of its time. If that Pope identified the workers’ question as the great social challenge of the first industrial revolution, Leo XIV regards artificial intelligence as one of the great res novaeof the twenty-first century, demanding appropriate moral and legal discernment (MH, para. 17).

(more…)

Continue Reading From Dignitatis Humanae to Magnifica Humanitas: Disarming AI to Protect Freedom of Conscience

Israel’s Death Penalty Law: “Jewish and Democratic”?

Ori Aronson is a professor of law and the director of the Menomadin Center for Jewish and Democratic Law at the Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law.

On 30 March 2026, in the midst of Israel’s latest war with Iran, the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, passed the “Death Penalty for Terrorists Law.” The new Law imposes the death penalty on terrorists tried in either Israeli civilian courts or military courts in the West Bank, and it stipulates new rules as to the carrying out of a sentence of execution. The Law breaks with Israel’s longstanding rejection, both de jure and de facto, of the death penalty, an exceptional punishment used only once ever in the state’s history, against a Nazi criminal. The Law signifies the ascent of nationalist and populist politics in Israel in the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 attacks and the traumatic hostage crisis that ensued. It is a troubling retrenchment from Israel’s commitment to Jewish and democratic values and is likely to invoke a contested constitutional debate as its validity now goes before the Supreme Court.

(more…)

Continue Reading Israel’s Death Penalty Law: “Jewish and Democratic”?

Michalyn Steele on Why the Progeny of Bowen v. Roy Changed Her View of the Original 1986 Case

Michalyn Steele (BYU Law School) discusses Bowen v. Roy (1986) and other SCOTUS decisions regarding Native American spirituality. While she initially accepted the “neutral and uniformly applicable” rationale behind the 1986 case, Steele now questions the Court’s adherence to First Amendment values in this line of cases.

(more…)

Continue Reading Michalyn Steele on Why the Progeny of Bowen v. Roy Changed Her View of the Original 1986 Case