There is a clothesline behind a house near mine that I think about more often than I probably should. Nobody uses it anymore, not really. It is just there, strung between two posts, a little rusted, mostly decorative now. But it is worth pausing on, because for most of human history a line like that represented hours of a woman’s week: hauling water, scrubbing by hand, wringing, hanging, waiting on the weather. A washing machine gave a woman back hours she would otherwise have spent at that line. Indoor plumbing, electricity, refrigeration, and modern medicine were not luxuries. They were hours and years given back to ordinary people, especially to women, who had carried a physical burden most of us can no longer imagine. I do not begin here out of nostalgia. I begin here because gratitude is the honest response, and it is where a Christian ought to start.
Technology transforms every civilization. It expands human capability. Printing multiplied knowledge. Electricity multiplied productivity. Modern medicine multiplied healing. Communication multiplied connection. Artificial Intelligence increasingly assists intellectual labor, judgment, analysis, creativity, and decision-making. Technology is therefore never the deepest question. It has never determined its own purpose, and it will not start now. The deeper question is what kind of persons we are becoming. Technology magnifies whatever kind of civilization already exists. It cannot replace formation.
Artificial Intelligence becomes the newest expression of an ancient civilizational question. Previous technologies primarily amplified physical labor. Many amplified communication. Artificial Intelligence increasingly reaches into forms of intellectual work once considered uniquely human. That makes the formation of the human person more, not less, important. Machines may increasingly perform human tasks. Only persons formed in wisdom can govern the moral use of those machines. The challenge is no longer merely technological. It is profoundly anthropological.
Technology transforms every area of civilization. Women provide one of the clearest historical illustrations because virtually every major technological shift has changed the possibilities of women’s daily lives. The heavy labor of earlier centuries. Printing. Education. Medicine. Electricity. Household technology. Transportation. Digital communication. Artificial Intelligence. Each opened genuine opportunities. Each also presented new temptations. The deeper question is never simply whether possibilities expanded. The deeper question is whether those possibilities helped women become more fully the persons God created them to be. Women’s experience therefore becomes one of the clearest historical tests of whether a civilization truly understands the human person. Authentic advances should be celebrated with gratitude. The feminine genius enriches every vocation and profession. At the same time, technology separated from authentic Christian anthropology has also facilitated profound distortions. Abortion. Pornography. The technological separation of sexuality from its life-giving meaning. Technology itself is not the problem. Mis-formed persons using powerful technologies become the problem.
One contemporary example is Natural Womanhood. Its work begins not with technology itself but with the woman before it. Questions of fertility, pregnancy, hormonal health, and family life are approached not merely as medical questions but as questions of the whole human person. Whether the subject is restorative reproductive medicine or artificial intelligence, the deeper question remains the same: Does this technology serve the person, or does the person gradually become subordinate to the technology?
The cities of Matthew 11 witnessed extraordinary miracles. Yet they refused conversion. The tragedy was not the absence of gifts. It was the failure to respond. The modern world has received astonishing gifts: scientific achievement, medical progress, communication, artificial intelligence. The decisive question remains exactly the same. Will these gifts become occasions of conversion or merely occasions of greater power? Here the hidden center of the entire triptych is finally revealed. The monasteries copied books within a Eucharistic rhythm. Universities pursued truth beneath the light of faith. Hospitals cared for the suffering because Christians first recognized Christ in every human person. The Eucharist was never simply the conclusion of the story. It has been the source the whole time, quietly forming the persons capable of doing all the rest.
This inheritance has now reached me in deeply personal ways: my education, my vocation, my marriage to Ted, our children, the daughters-in-law who have become daughters to me, the grandchildren I already pray for though they are not yet born, my writing, and my work. None of it is something I built. It was handed to me, at a cost paid by people whose names I will mostly never know. Gratitude naturally becomes responsibility. What inheritance do I hope to hand on? More fundamentally, what kind of persons do I hope future generations become?
The Christian story has never depended upon extraordinary people alone. It has always depended upon ordinary men and women seeking to know and do the will of God in the circumstances of their own age. The Irish monk copying a manuscript. St. Benedict ordering a monastery. St. Thomas teaching in the classroom. The physician caring for the sick. Father Damien embracing the lepers on Molokai. The mother hanging clothes on a line. The engineer designing new tools. The programmer writing code. Technology can extend life and improve sanitation. It cannot love a leper. Only a formed person can do that. Each received gifts. Each was called to cultivate those gifts wisely. Each became responsible for handing them on faithfully. Civilizations are ultimately remembered not because of the greatness of the things they produced, but because of the kind of human persons they formed. The future of Christian civilization will therefore be determined not merely by the technologies we invent, but by whether those technologies remain ordered toward the dignity of the human person and, ultimately, toward communion with God.
Principal Sources
Holy Bible. New American Bible Revised Edition.
Aquinas, Thomas. Eucharistic hymns (Pange Lingua, Adoro Te Devote).
Benedict of Nursia. The Rule of St. Benedict.
Damien de Veuster, St. (Father Damien). Letters and historical accounts from Molokai.
John Paul II, Pope. Redemptor Hominis. Encyclical Letter. March 4, 1979. Vatican.
———. Mulieris Dignitatem. Apostolic Letter. August 15, 1988. Vatican.
———. Fides et Ratio. Encyclical Letter. September 14, 1998. Vatican.
Second Vatican Council. Gaudium et Spes. Pastoral Constitution. December 7, 1965. Vatican.
Cahill, Thomas. How the Irish Saved Civilization. New York: Doubleday, 1995.
Carroll, Warren H. The History of Christendom. Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press.
Dawson, Christopher. Works on Christian culture and European unity.
Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Woods, Thomas E., Jr. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization. Washington, DC: Regnery, 2005.
Natural Womanhood Educational articles and resources on fertility awareness, restorative reproductive medicine, women’s health, and Christian anthropology. NaturalWomanhood.org. Author’s note: Ted and I have practiced Natural Family Planning throughout our forty-five-year marriage. That experience has led us to follow the work of organizations such as Natural Womanhood with longstanding personal and professional interest.
Related Author’s Work Naming the Machine