May 1, 2025 | By Zeki Tan MY ‘25

Just as baptism in Christianity marks the transformation of individuals from old life to new life, sinful humans apart from Christ to communion with Him, there are also rituals that mark the degeneration of the body from vitality to mortality, its movement from earthly life to afterlife. Burial rites are a tangible, material means to commemorate these transformations in community.

May 1, 2025 | By Joseph Yu BF ‘28

Last summer, I volunteered to be a counselor at a week-long summer camp. It was your standard summer camp, just with one small detail—all of the attendees were foster children. Upon arriving at the retreat grounds after a 1.5-hour car ride, the work began immediately. I was handed beds to set up, bikes to inflate, and boxes upon boxes of toys to unpack. Some of my fellow counselors had been participating for over 10 years, whereas this was my first time—nonetheless, we all did the same work.

May 1, 2025 | By Gavin Susantio YDS ‘25

Transhumanism is the future of human transformation—or rather human evolution, as many transhumanist movements call it. But what exactly is transhumanism? In fact, the word “transhuman” comes from a Christian epic from the 13th century, Dante’s Paradiso. You might’ve heard of Dante’s Inferno, which is part of the epic trilogy of Dante’s journey through the underworld, purgatory, and the heavens. In this article, I would like to explore the religious undertones and general trajectory of transhumanism, as well as Dante’s vision of transhumanism that Christianity offers and safeguards. The latter is traditionally called deification.

May 1, 2025 | By Fiona Bultonsheen MPP ‘26

How do we make the world a safer place? Whole companies, units, and sectors of the government are dedicated to this pursuit. It seems that no matter how many guidelines, regulations, and executive orders are put into place, there are still bad actors who will wiggle their way around to poison the online world with their malicious content. Slash one hydra-like head and three more grow in its place. This is the heavy-laden state of modern tech policy. I’d like to suggest that one can have hope amidst this complex and often depressing digital environment.

May 1, 2025 | By Raleigh Adams YDS ‘26

“What if the sadness never leaves?” That’s the question I couldn’t stop thinking about after ChatGPT told me my patterns and blind spots based on our chat histories. Number one was “your emotional residue lingers”; that “your heartbreak still shows up—beautifully, honestly—but it may color other aspects of your life more than you intend. Whether it’s in your theology of longing, or your cautious approach to new people, there's a tension between your mind's clarity and your heart’s ache.”

May 1, 2025 | By Isaac Oberman BF ‘26

What does it mean to be an adult? To define it against time, adulthood is the state after childhood. It follows then that adulthood results from growth and development, in which one progresses past the state of childhood that one is born into. From here, we have to ask the question: growth and development toward what? Growth and development are ordered toward membership in a community. As Plato firmly stated in The Republic, man is a social animal who is naturally drawn towards life in society with others.

May 1, 2025 | By Emma Ventresca BF ‘26

Transformation is a “coming into” ourselves, a metamorphosis rather than discrete change that fundamentally alters who we are. In the words of philosopher and theologian Karl Rahner, “True 'becoming' must be conceived as something 'becoming more', as the coming into being of more reality, as an effective attainment of a greater fullness of being.” What it means to ‘become’ oneself “must be understood as a real self-transcendence, a surpassing of self or active filling up of the empty.”