Know Your Enemy - Pope Leo XIV's 'Magnifica humanitas' (w/ Jack Hanson)

Matt and Sam are joined by Jack Hanson to discuss Pope Leo's first encyclical on human dignity in the time of artificial intelligence.

Duration: 1h 36m
Broadcast on: 22 Jun 2026
Audio Format: other

As promised, here is our episode about Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, in which he brings to bear Catholic social teaching on the perils of artificial intelligence and what they reveal about what it really means to be human being. It's a distinctly Augustinian reading of our nature and destiny, marked not just by Leo's attention to our limits as flawed and fallible creatures, but the joy and hope found by living into them—which, finally, becomes his plea to see life from the perspective of the lowly, the downcast, the abandoned.

To help us explain such a rich document, we had on our friend Jack Hanson, one of the most perceptive American writers on the Catholic Church. We tease out the connections between this Leo's first and encyclical and that of his namesake Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, an intervention on behalf of working people during the industrial and considered the origin of Catholic social teaching; Leo's "Augustinianism"; the encyclical's critique of artificial intelligence and what that has to do with its account of what really makes us human; and more.

Sources:

Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica humanitas, May 15, 2026

Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891

Jack Hanson, "A Serious Man: The Militant Mysticism of Charles Péguy," Commonweal, May 3, 2021

– “The Heresy of Americanism,” The Drift, Jun 10, 2025.

Michael Oakeshott, "The Tower of Babel" in On History and Other Essays (1983)

Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Tower of Babel" in Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (1937)

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” (1985)

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All right, welcome listeners to episode 138 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt, sit in your podcast co-host, and I'm here as always with my great friend, Sam of the Bell. Hey, Sam. Hi, Matt. Once more, we dragooned you into a very Catholic episode. It really doesn't take that much convincing. I like this stuff. I feel like we're dragooning the listeners into listening to it. I was used to use a proxy for the listeners in that statement. I try to be. I try to be, but I think I'm I'm into deep. Yes, yes. You've read one too many people in cyclicals. You can swim in the deep end. I hope so. I feel that way. I mean, yeah, you're actually leading the swimming lessons, Sam, and doing bad flips off the diving board and showing us up, frankly. But this is the episode. I believe we've promised or at least intimated on Pope Leo, the 14th's first papal and cyclical Magnifica humanitas on magnificent humans, human grander, and safeguarding it in human dignity in the time of artificial intelligence came out just over a month ago on May 15th. And it was really fantastic to read and fascinating to talk about. Yeah, absolutely. It's a very interesting document, and yeah, unbelievably relevant to a lot of Know Your Enemy concerns. Not just our interest in Catholic stuff, but also American war making and greed and yeah, and the effects of artificial intelligence on our humanity. So I really enjoyed this conversation. We had a great guest. Yes, we did have a great guest, our friend Jack Hansen. Jack is a writer, critic, scholar of religion. His writings appeared all over the place. New York Review Books, New York Times Book Review, The Nation, and importantly, Common Wheel. A few years ago, we'll actually put the essay he wrote on Charles Bege, the French writer in the show notes. But it's also worth mentioning that Jack is a lecturer in English and Compare of Literature, Columbia University, and he is a newsletter, Phantom Heresy, that you and I Sam are both fans of. Oh yeah, it's really good. And he was fantastic in this episode. He really, really very, very good. I learned a lot from Jack in this conversation, and I think listeners will as well. And we explain a lot about this document, what it refers back to, Leo's choice of name, the concerns of his papacy, all that. Yeah. We explain, I give a bunch of backdrop to this encyclical, what Leo's trying to do and how it fits into the recent history of the Catholic Church and politics and religion in the United States. That's right. Once again, we bring up non-controversial, topics everyone agrees on. Very perfect for polite dinner party conversations. Well, you know, this is Leo continuing Francis's synodal impulse, which is to say, walking together. So listeners, just think of this episode as a walking together. We're not telling you what to think or how to think about it. We're inviting you on a walk. Yes. We don't tell you what to think because we know the persuasive force of the truth itself will draw you. We don't have to be too heavy.

Well, should we do housekeeping, Matt? Yes. Let's get to some housekeeping items. As always, we're grateful to our partners at Descent. One thing they do for us is they sponsor the podcast. And that means if you subscribe to Know Your Enemy on our Patreon at patreon.com/ Know Your Enemy for $10 a month, you get access to all of our bonus episodes, the Know Your Enemy Discord, and a free digital subscription to Descent. And for $5 a month, if you subscribe, you get access to all of our bonus episodes, of which, well, there was a previous one on Pope Leo and Donald Trump. I'm sure there'll be others coming down the pike. So please consider subscribing and supporting us, especially this summer. You want something to listen to on long car rides. Just what your kids on the way to the beat want to hear. Two and a half hours on natural rights history. It's really crazy to think that there are probably some family car rides where people are listening to this podcast. Parents of the year, whoever they are. They are, yeah, absolutely. Well, as always, we want to thank Jesse Breneman, our intrepid producer, and Will Epstein, who does the music for the podcast. Yes, shall we get to it? Let's. Here's our episode with Jack Hanson on Pope Leo's first syncyclical and safeguarding human dignity and the time of artificial intelligence. Enjoy. All right, gentlemen, let's get started. We're very pleased to welcome, for the very first time, our great friend, Jack Hanson,

Transcription truncated.

Matt and Sam are joined by Jack Hanson to discuss Pope Leo's first encyclical on human dignity in the time of artificial intelligence.