AI is at the core of green technology, which has been the good news promising to reverse the curve of our carbon footprint and ease the stress of breaching the planetary boundaries. Nowadays, unfortunately, AI is becoming increasingly energy-intensive, so the net energy gain of green technology is no longer certain. This situation confirms the rebound effect and calls for strong moral and ethical standards that set criteria for both the production and use of AI. Ecodonomy is the art of elevating the city-nation. Can we, as human beings, decide not just to build “Towers of Babel” but to rebuild humanity materially and elevate it, based on values such as the common good and the universal destination of goods and services?

From 19 to 21 October 2026, the Indian Social Institute in Delhi hosted the Jesuit Lawyers Meeting of the Jesuit Conference of South Asia (JCSA). The meeting brought participants together with the objectives of establishing a Conference-level forum, addressing issues at the national level, providing legal literacy to vulnerable people, and creating mechanisms for networking and collaboration. The official inauguration was led by Fr Stany D Souza, President of the Conference, who called on participants to be vigilant lawyers in defending and promoting constitutional values, and by Fr Ajit Xess, new JCSA President, who recalled the historic legacy of Jesuit lawyers in Chotanagpur.

Both volumes of A Journey of Faith Promoting Justice (1891–2024) are now available to download. Edited by Fr Xavier Jeyaraj, SJ, the work brings together more than 130 years of the Society of Jesus’ commitment to social justice. It offers an opportunity to explore this history and find guidance for the challenges facing our mission today. Its pages remind us that promoting justice flows from faith and leads us to ever deeper faith, as General Congregation 34 affirms. They also convey Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, SJ's invitation to embrace justice in love as “the dream of God for us and our own clear responsibility”. The initiative emerged during the Social Justice and Ecology Secretariat's jubilee in 2019. What began as a proposal to bring together key documents grew into a collection of more than 1,500 pages.

By examining the tensions between democratic institutions, citizen participation, social movements, and the common good, the article opens a path for reflecting on how new forms of power emerge and how societies can respond to them. As AI systems increasingly shape public life and influence collective decision-making, Bado's vision of a more participatory and substantive democracy challenges us to consider how technology can be governed in ways that promote justice, inclusion, accountability, and human dignity. We invite readers to revisit this earlier reflection as a valuable source of inspiration for discerning how democracy may evolve in response to the opportunities and risks posed by AI and for ensuring that technological progress continues to serve people and the common good.

In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV warns that machine intelligence in war ends by “reducing victims to data.” The machine profiling that registers a person for food can also be used to select a person as a target. A small drone circling a road, with no one steering it, can have such a profile as its target. A drone like this is an autonomous weapon system. Once activated, it selects and attacks targets by itself, matching what its sensors detect to a programmed target profile. No human being decides, at the moment of the strike, that this particular person will die or is the right target. The case most often cited as the first use of such a weapon against people, reported by UN experts, was in Africa, in Libya in 2020.

Democracy, which has historically proven most effective in meeting these criteria, cannot be taken for granted. In our AI era, citizens should press for more than multiparty elections and the protection of basic freedoms; that institutional core is not enough. We must carefully regulate and channel powerful technologies with the capacity to divide us from one another and short-circuit social and political participation. That means maintaining spaces in civil society where human contact and social friendship can flourish without the mediation of machines, beginning with the educational systems through which all citizens pass. It means fighting deepfakes and disinformation in the public sphere, so that citizens still operate in a world of facts and evidence and political representation has a strong basis.