From 16-17 September 2026, in St. Louis Missouri, the Lyceum Institute is hosting our first in-person event, Human Formation in the Digital Age: a conference asking how we must respond to our changed and rapidly changing technological environments in seeking to retrieve and foster a genuine formation of the human person. Here we announce our first plenary speaker:
Mariele Courtois
Mariele Courtois is the Director of the Center for Technology and Human Dignity and an Assistant Professor of Moral Theology at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. Her research interests include biomedical ethics, technology ethics, disability theology, and the thought of St. Edith Stein. She earned a Ph.D. with distinction in Moral Theology & Ethics (2022) and a Master of Philosophy in Theology and Religious Studies (2021) from the Catholic University of America. Additionally, she is a member of the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education’s AI Research Group and a contributing author of Encountering Artificial Intelligence: Ethical and Anthropological Investigations (2024) and Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2026). Currently, Dr. Courtois is working on a manuscript about the ethics of genetic engineering technologies at the beginning of life.
Professor Courtois will be presenting: “To Build a Human Heart: Hope for Designing Technologies toward Genuinely Human Ends”.
Abstract:
Significant discussion is currently underway in both academic and public contexts regarding the new papal encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. This plenary will highlight the distinct intentionality characterized by the encyclical between innovation that is ordered to the common good and innovation that is considered disordered. This distinction can be helpful to broad audiences in determining general principles that are further helpful for building ethical technologies from the ground up. This talk will explain how this distinction aligns with insights from disability ethics that can be helpful in describing the differences between compassionate building efforts toward the common good versus building efforts that are constrained or distorted by profit-focused ends or a drive for control and speed. Finally, this talk will describe goals to integrate into human formation that can help individuals lead vocations of ethical technological development and technology use.
Talks by and with Prof. Courtois
- Our Fight for Humanity (with Fr. Anselm Ramelow)
- A Catholic View of Artificial Intelligence (with Dr. Paul Scherz)
- Applying Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas
Learn more about the conference and register here!
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