released 5/23/2025

In this 2015 essay, Michael Hanby unpacks the summons of Laudato si’ to an ecological way of life based on a proper understanding of creation in its fullness and integrity. Focusing on a key chapter of the encyclical, Hanby explores the consequences of the technocratic paradigm on human life and knowing. With its focus on mastery, control, and manipulation, this one-dimensional paradigm reduces our apprehension of being and truth, trapping us in a momentum that feels fated. Pope Francis (1936–2025) understood that our current ecological crisis is rooted in a failure to grasp our human creatureliness and our interconnection with the world. The technocratic way of knowing destroys this unity of experience because it denies that there is an inherent nature to things. Truth is whatever is possible; this leads to a perpetual war against the given limitations of nature. Hanby stresses our need to recover a comprehensive vision of ecology, one based on a proper anthropomorphism distinguished by the capacity for reception and relationship, not by the power to dominate.

This essay was published in the Winter 2015 issue of Communio. Its full title is “The Gospel of Creation and the Technocratic Paradigm: Reflections on a Central Teaching of Laudato si’.” It is read by Ken Myers. To download a PDF copy of the essay, click here.

57 minutes

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