“… hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” Romans 5:5 NASB
Artificial intelligence isn’t a guest visiting for a season, it has moved in and set up shop. It lives in our phones, churches, hospitals, and homes. It curates our playlists, predicts our spending, suggests our prayers, and sometimes even writes our sermons. Coexistence, then, is not optional. The question is whether we can coexist in a spiritually healthy manner, one that deepens our humanity rather than dilutes it.
To coexist faithfully means to let neither fear nor fascination rule us. Fear convinces us that AI will replace us; fascination tempts us to let it. Both miss the point. People of faith are called to live alongside technology with discernment and humility, resisting both the illusion of control and the despair of irrelevance.
For all its predictive brilliance, AI cannot pray, weep, or wonder. It can mimic compassion, but not surrender. It can analyze human emotion, but not experience it. The Franciscan imagination reminds us that creation, including the human-made world of code and circuitry, is still part of God’s world. But only humanity bears the capacity for soul, for longing, for love that suffers and redeems.
Coexistence, then, is not a negotiation with machines, it is a spiritual practice among humans about how we use them.
1. Hope as Surrender, Not Optimism
Faith-based hope is not the same as optimism. Optimism is a weather forecast; hope is a covenant. Optimism predicts outcomes; hope surrenders them.
In the Franciscan tradition, hope emerges not from certainty but from trust, trust that divine love continues to work even in confusion and disruption. As St. Francis taught, we find God not in control but in relinquishment. Hope, for Francis, was not a rosy confidence that things would turn out fine, but the willingness to walk barefoot into the unknown, trusting that God’s presence would meet him there.
When we mistake AI’s forecasts for faith’s hope, we confuse data confidence with spiritual trust. An algorithm might predict recovery rates for the sick or estimate climate outcomes for the planet. These forecasts can be useful, even inspiring, but they can’t teach us how to sit with grief, how to pray through uncertainty, or how to love what we may lose.
Hope begins where prediction ends. It is born when we choose faithfulness over control, willingness over willfulness. The AI age tempts us to measure everything, to optimize, to manage risk, to secure results. But the Franciscan path teaches that surrender is not passivity; it’s the deepest form of participation. It is the art of letting God’s grace do what our grasping cannot.
2. Solidarity as the Face of Hope
Hope in the Christian imagination is never solitary. It is, as the prophets declared, born in community. Hope is sustained not by certainty but by companionship. The Franciscan way calls this being with rather than doing for.
Solidarity is where hope breathes. It is incarnational, embodied in listening, touch, and shared presence. In this light, AI can make hope more accessible and actionable by connecting communities across distance, revealing hidden needs, or amplifying marginalized voices. It can process massive amounts of data to show us who is being left behind. It can remind us, through pattern and prediction, that our neighbor is closer than we thought.
But solidarity must remain human. A chatbot can send comforting words, but it cannot keep vigil at a bedside or shed tears that sanctify suffering. Yet it can free human caregivers from administrative burdens so that they can show up in love. When technology serves relationships rather than replaces it, it becomes a partner in the work of hope.
Francis of Assisi would recognize this: the holiness of proximity. To “be with” creation and each other is the heart of hope. Even the best-designed algorithm cannot incarnate presence. It can only point toward it. And perhaps that is its highest ethical calling, to remind us of what only we can do.
3. Prophetic Hope in Disruption
The Hebrew prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos—offered hope not in comfort but in collapse. They dared to believe that God’s newness could rise from ruins. Walter Brueggemann calls this “the horror of the old collapsing and the hope of the new emerging.”
Our era’s disruptions: climate change, displacement, and digital isolation find a mirror in the age of AI. The prophetic task is not to resist technology outright but to reclaim its direction. Faith communities have a prophetic imperative to ensure that AI serves justice, mercy, and shared flourishing.
AI can go beyond prediction when it feeds real hope: when it exposes injustice, reveals truth, or helps imagine new economies of care. Imagine algorithms that prioritize the hungry over the profitable, or systems that help restore ecological balance rather than exploit it. Prophetic hope transforms technology from a mirror of power into a window of possibility.
Yet prophecy always begins with lament. We must name the pain of our age, the loneliness, the disconnection, the temptation to substitute simulation for presence. In naming it, we keep it human. The prophets of Israel didn’t offer quick solutions; they offered faithful witness. Likewise, our hope for AI is not that it will save us, but that through it, we might rediscover what needs saving: our compassion, our humility, and our sense of shared destiny.
4. A Future Worth Coexisting With
To coexist with AI faithfully is to remember that intelligence is not wisdom, and power is not love. AI may analyze vast datasets, but faith invites us into mystery, the space where surrender becomes strength and community becomes salvation.
A spiritually healthy coexistence doesn’t idolize AI nor exile it. Instead, it consecrates the tools of our age for the service of God’s reconciling work. Technology, like fire or language, can both heal and harm. Our task is to keep it lit with compassion, humility, and justice.
This is not nostalgia for a pre-digital past; it is a call for moral imagination. Coexistence means insisting that progress must serve presence, that algorithms must bend toward mercy, and that the ultimate measure of intelligence is love.
The Franciscan tradition, with its emphasis on humility and relationality, offers an antidote to the empire of efficiency. It invites us to see AI not as a rival intelligence but as a mirror reflecting what we value. The question is not, “Can AI love?” but “Can we?”
Conclusion: The Stubborn, Sacred Hope
Artificial intelligence can calculate probabilities, but it cannot kindle hope. Hope is the province of the soul, the stubborn, sacred belief that life can be renewed even when the data says otherwise.
If we approach AI with humility, we may yet find that it sharpens our awareness of what is uniquely human: our vulnerability, our longing for connection, our capacity for grace.
In the end, coexistence with AI is less about technological control and more about spiritual formation. The future worth coexisting with will be one where our tools amplify love rather than efficiency, justice rather than profit, and wonder rather than fear.
Machines may forecast the future, but only people of faith can hope their way into it.
Views and opinions expressed by authors and editors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of AI and Faith or any of its leadership.
