Personalism for the Twenty-First Century: Essays in Honor of David Walsh
Edited by Thomas W. Holman and Richard Avramenko.
Lexington Books, 2025.
Hardcover, 266 pages, $115.
Reviewed by Grant R. Martsolf.
The first time I had ever heard of ChatGPT was in April of 2023 during an interview conducted by Bari Weiss of The Free Press with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. Since then, I’ve been struck by the speed with which generative AI has entered public consciousness. It is no longer just as a curiosity but has already begun to reshape how we read, research, and write.
Clearly, many see AI as an existential threat to humanity, despite its much-touted promise to vastly improve human life. What to do about generative AI will undoubtedly become a central question for politics, religion, and culture alike. Pope Leo XIV chose his papal name in homage to Leo XIII, who regarded the Church’s response to the Industrial Revolution as the defining challenge of his pontificate. In the same spirit, Leo XIV views guiding the Church through the AI Revolution as a central task of his own.
While I am skeptical of both the utopian and apocalyptic future some predict for AI, I do think this moment has surfaced a profound and necessary question: What does it mean to be a person? Writers across the ideological spectrum are grappling with this question in light of a technology that seems to mimic—or even threaten—the core of what seems to make us unique. And it raises parallel questions about whether our ChatBots are in fact persons.
This is precisely the kind of question the tradition of personalism is equipped to address. Personalism is a philosophical movement that places the human person at the center of inquiry, affirming the inherent dignity, value, and uniqueness of each individual. While it spans both religious and secular traditions, its common thread is a commitment to defending the irreducible reality of the person in an age increasingly shaped by systems, technologies, and abstractions.
A recent volume published by Lexington Books, Personalism for the Twenty-First Century, explores how this tradition might respond to the pressing questions of our time. The book is a festschrift honoring David Walsh, a longtime scholar of personalism and professor at the Catholic University of America. Walsh’s work spans philosophy, political theory, and religious studies, and he has been instrumental in bringing the personalist tradition into contemporary discourse.
Personalism for the Twenty-First Century is, admittedly, an insider’s book. If you’re unfamiliar with Walsh, his interlocutors, or the specific debates being referenced, it can feel opaque. I would not consider myself a Walsh insider, though I do hold personalism as the centerpiece of my teaching and research. He is a key voice that I long wanted to engage.
For novice readers, I suspect the most valuable section of the book will be the introduction by Thomas Holman. It stands as a contribution in its own right. For someone like me, well-versed in the personalist tradition but new to Walsh, it was especially useful. Holman presents Walsh as a key guide for bringing personalism into the twenty-first century, offering a clear entry point into his thought. He highlights themes central to Walsh’s work, especially the mystery of the person and the essential role of relationality in personhood. The introduction allowed me to engage more fully in later chapters. As a side note, if you are new to personalism more generally, I would recommend starting with Juan Manuel Burgos’s “An Introduction to Personalism.”
The range of topics covered in the essays is vast. As Holman puts it, the aim of the volume is to explore “what it means to bring the person into every instant of scholarly reflection.” The book spans a wide terrain—touching on bioethics, James Joyce, the influence of Kierkegaard, Voegelin, and Boehme on Walsh’s thought, historical analysis, and political theory. It is, frankly, too much to cover in any detail here. Instead, I want to focus on how Walsh defines and conceptualizes personhood itself and how this may help us address some of the key threats to it in the twenty-first century—particularly AI.
A recent Free Press article by Tyler Cowen and Avital Balwit, titled “AI Will Change What It Is to Be Human. Are We Ready?” offers a compelling example of how the question of the human person lies at the heart of our existential engagement with AI. The authors argue that AI may demoralize human beings—that a core feature of our identity is under threat. Implicit in their argument is the notion that what makes us human is being “the smartest and most capable entities in the room.” This reflects a distinctly and diminished understanding of the person as primarily a cognitive being—what some have called “brains on sticks.” They’ve isolated one dimension of the person and treat it as definitive.
By contrast, personalism offers a philosophical anthropology that explicitly rejects reductionism. It insists on a holistic understanding of the person. Human beings cannot be reduced to a single capacity, nor are we merely the sum of our capacities. We especially cannot be reduced to our mental faculties. We are emergent beings. When human bodies and human souls unite, along with the profound capacities this entails, something irreducible comes into being. As Christian Smith, in his book To Flourish Or Destruct, puts it, “Antireductionism is a nonnegotiable, live-or-die commitment” for the kind of personalism he defends. In an age of AI, where personhood is increasingly defined in functional terms, this antireductionism is not only relevant. It is urgently needed.
In his essay “Luminosity before Theory,” James Greenaway makes central Walsh’s own live-or-die commitment to non-reductionism. Like other thinkers in the personalist tradition, reduction and abstraction of personhood is the original sin. However, Walsh is cautious even of other personalist attempts to define the human person too concisely. He is skeptical of any objective theory of personhood, warning that even well-meaning personalist frameworks can fall into abstraction and objectification. In this sense, he critiques some brands of personalism for unwittingly mimicking the very reductionist tendencies it seeks to reject.
Instead, Greenaway points out that the mystery of the person is key to Walsh’s work. Each person is an inexhaustible subject that is immanent yet able to transcend immanence through an encounter with the divine Being. The person is then illuminated such that the divine is made manifest through persons (i.e., luminosity). In this way, the human person is not a category to be defined and measured in immanent terms but a transcendent mystery to be encountered.
For Walsh, this mystery—rooted in transcendence and made manifest in luminosity—is made possible through love. Again, Greenway writes, “It is by their love that persons give the gift of themselves.” He continues. “It is only in love that they affirm their transcendence as belonging to the flow of divine love.”
The relational nature of human personhood is further developed by several of the authors, particularly through engagement with Walsh’s concept of mutuality—understood as central to personhood. Thomas Holman, in his essay “Paths to Mutuality,” argues that human beings possess a primordial responsibility toward the other because our very personhood is constituted in relation. This responsibility is not merely ethical or social—it is ontological. To be a person is to be called into relation, to recognize the other as a locus of irreducible value. For Holman, this relational call points beyond the immanent, connecting personhood to transcendence itself and their relationship with God “who is himself being-in-relation.” In this way, the mystery of what it means to be a person is grounded in our relation to others through which we mutually participate in transcendent Being. Again, Holman points to the very fact that this concept of mutuality cannot be exactly defined but we can describe some of its characteristics.
This may strike some as an unsatisfying response to the challenge posed by AI. It lacks the precision we often seek in public discourse. Some might ask, “But, wait…is a chatbot a person or not? Specifically, why not?” Walsh cautions, however, that giving in to the temptation to offer a detailed theory of personhood risks undermining the very essence of what it means to be human. His point is that any effort to safeguard human uniqueness must begin not with a better theory, but with a deeper attunement to the mystery of who we are, encountered through the divine in interpersonal communion.
And this all presupposes a particular metaphysical understanding of the universe. Although Walsh’s definition of personhood does not formally or dogmatically rely on God, the full truth about the human person appears inseparable from God and divine love. In fact, Bartholomew Jerome Santamaria, in “Rediscovering Persons as the Imago Dei,” argues that understanding persons as inherently relational illuminates the very nature of God, since we are created in God’s image. In these accounts, mutuality is not a secondary feature of moral life but a fundamental expression of the human vocation to participate in divine relationality. This vision of human persons is deeply entwined with a Christian understanding of God and humanity.
At the same time, Walsh acknowledges that making the case for the divine source of human personhood is exceptionally difficult, particularly in a cultural moment where traditional arguments for God have lost much of their persuasive power. Sollenberger addresses this challenge in his chapter, “The Experiential Roots of the Innerworldly.” We no longer possess, at least collectively, the language or conceptual frameworks that once made discourse about transcendence intelligible. Knowledge of God must now arise experientially and phenomenologically—through love, suffering, moral struggle, and the texture of ordinary life. Transcendence is not something we define abstractly, but something revealed in lives lived.
But, of course, this may just leave us an impasse when engaging secular audiences about the limits of their Chatbots. To say that a chatbot is not a person because it cannot participate in transcendence with the divine through interpersonal communion seems to be a claim that must simply be asserted and believed. I suspect for many people reading this review, it will be largely self-evident that Walsh’s case for persons excludes chatbots. Of course, chatbots do not have in them a human soul that is capable of participation in the Being of the cosmos.
But for AI apologists, this is far from self-evident. Many tech futurists view AI as participating in some form of transcendental Being—or perhaps even as Being itself. Famously, when asked if there is a God, Ray Kurzweil responded, “Not yet.” And for many ordinary people, it seems they have largely accepted the idea that chatbots may be “persons” in some sense, as they fall in love with them and substitute communion with actual persons for a kind of simulated communion with AI.
The distinction between persons and non-persons—between human beings and artificial systems—may not be something we can assert dogmatically or prove definitively in a way that satisfies AI apologists. Rather, it may emerge conversationally, as people interact with these technologies and begin to sense their limits: their inability to transcend, to love, or to suffer. In this context, those committed to personalism may be required to avoid rigid doctrines, but can help hear and interpret the experiences of others—to serve as witnesses to the mystery of the person and to point beyond what systems can simulate to what only persons can be. I hope we reach this point before too many people fall into AI-driven delusions that make this truth unrecognizable.
If the AI revolution forces us to reconsider what makes us human, then perhaps it is not merely a threat, but also a call to contemplate the mystery of personhood. Walsh urges us to resist reductionism in all its forms and to rediscover the transcendent depth of what it means to love and be loved. Personalism, especially in the hands of thinkers like Walsh, reminds us that human dignity is not a problem to be solved or a concept to be updated. Rather, it is a mystery to be contemplated. In a world of increasingly powerful machines, it may be the quiet, relational mystery of the person that most urgently needs defending.
Grant Martsolf is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he writes and teaches about the ways culture, character, and vocation shape human flourishing.
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