Mehkurydiaries

At an AI conference in Rome this week, Pope Leo called for artificial intelligence to be guided by wisdom and charity—to serve human dignity and strengthen the bonds between people. Some will hear pious decoration. It is closer to a design requirement. Intelligence tells us how to do something. Wisdom asks whether it should be done. Charity asks who may be crushed while we are congratulating ourselves for doing it efficiently. History contains many efficient cruelties. Their paperwork was often excellent. The modern world has accumulated astonishing intelligence. We can model diseases, predict behaviour, move money in milliseconds and direct machines from continents away. Yet wars remain, propaganda improves and hunger survives beside abundance. Our problem is not always insufficient information. Sometimes we know exactly what we are doing. Artificial intelligence will magnify human goals. It does not automatically purify them. Give it medicine and it may help find a treatmen...

France spent decades teaching religion to leave through the front door. It has now found young adults knocking at the side door. More than 13,000 adults were baptised in the Catholic Church in France at Easter 2026. The official figure—13,234—is 28 percent higher than in 2025 and more than triple the number recorded in 2016. This does not mean secular France has suddenly become a monastery. One Easter is not a census, and a baptismal queue is not proof that every pew will remain occupied. Still, the increase deserves more than a shrug. Inherited religion is weakening. Chosen religion may be stirring. That distinction matters. A person baptised as an adult has usually crossed questions, suspicion and inconvenience to reach the font. The French bishops’ survey found that 40 percent of catechumens began seeking baptism after an ordeal triggered a search for meaning. Pain remains an excellent theologian. It asks questions comfort postpones. Modern society has liberated people from many r...

Creation often begins before the first brick, line of code or drop of paint. It begins when the thing receives a name. A nameless idea can wander around the mind for years wearing the clothes of “someday.” Name it, and it acquires borders. It can be described, challenged, remembered and summoned. This is why naming is not clerical work. It is the first architecture. In Genesis, God speaks light into existence and calls the light Day. The command is not vague. What is being called forth is already intelligible to the One calling it. He had named it light before calling it. Romans describes God as the One who calls things that do not exist as though they did. That is not positive thinking wearing a church suit. Divine speech carries creative authority. Human speech does not possess that sovereignty, but it reflects a smaller pattern: we name what we intend to bring from possibility into form. I have named ideas before I possessed the complete machinery to build them. BioSSD. HalloZero....

We once kept money in pockets. Then cards replaced cash, phones replaced cards, and now the body itself is being invited to the checkout. Mastercard has tested biometric payments using faces, palms and irises. Amazon once allowed customers to pay with a palm scan, although it withdrew the retail service in June 2026 after limited adoption. The experiment may have stumbled. The idea has not. Convenience is history’s most courteous salesman. It never kicks down the door. It simply asks why you are still carrying a wallet when your hand is already attached. There are obvious advantages. Biometrics can reduce forgotten passwords, stolen cards and checkout friction. Identity can become harder to misplace. It can also become impossible to replace. A compromised password can be changed. A face cannot be recalled and reissued before lunch. When identity, payment, health access and movement gather beneath one biological signature, the body stops being merely personal. It becomes infrastructur...