​Bodies Remember What Minds Alone Cannot

David DeSteno’s recent New York Times essay raises a striking question: Can artificial intelligence become moral by being trained on religion? Anthropic, he notes, has sought counsel from clergy as it tries to make Claude “a genuinely good, wise and virtuous agent.” DeSteno’s answer is skeptical. Not because religion lacks moral wisdom, but because Claude lacks a body.

That claim deserves attention. It also deserves extension.

DeSteno’s argument is, at one level, straightforward. Religious life does not shape people chiefly by supplying doctrines or ethical propositions. It shapes them through bodily practices: prayer, fasting, meditation, singing, kneeling, gathering, blessing, grieving, feasting. It is one thing to possess a rule. It is another to be formed by a way of life. A machine may process texts about compassion, but it does not breathe through prayer, hunger through fasting, or find itself consoled by the touch and cadence of communal worship.

What DeSteno sees through the lens of psychology, others have been saying in philosophical and theological registers for some time. Richard Kearney, in his work on carnal hermeneutics, argues that meaning begins in the flesh. We do not first hover above the world as detached minds and then descend into bodily life as an afterthought. We come to know through touch, taste, breath, sound, gesture, and presence. The body is not the container of interpretation. It is its first site.

That matters for religion because worship is never merely an exchange of ideas. Water is poured. Bread is broken. Oil is pressed into skin. Voices rise and fall together. Knees bend. Hands are opened. Bodies learn. The sacred is not simply thought. It is enacted. It comes to visibility in practice.

This is where the work of Buki Fatona becomes especially illuminating. Fatona argues that Christian remembrance, particularly in Eucharistic anamnesis, should not be imagined as the retrieval of a stored image from a mental archive. Memory, she suggests, is constructive and enacted. It arises through embodied participation in a world of practices. In that sense, remembrance is not something minds do alone in private; it is something bodies do together in ritual action.

That insight feels exactly right. In the Eucharist, the Church does not merely think back to Jesus. It stands, answers, blesses, breaks, tastes, receives. It inhabits a pattern. The remembering is communal, bodily, and performative. We do not just recall Christ; we are drawn again into the shape of his life.

Mark Johnson would push the point further. In The Meaning of the Body, and in his broader work on embodied cognition, Johnson argues that meaning itself is rooted in bodily patterns. Our deepest concepts—gift, burden, cleansing, hunger, nearness, reconciliation—do not float free of experience. They emerge from it. They are learned in the felt life of bodies moving through the world.

That has consequences for how we think about morality and about A.I. A system like Claude may be able to define compassion, summarize sermons, or reproduce moral language with remarkable fluency. But it does not know compassion through vulnerability, dependence, hunger, consolation, fatigue, tenderness, or awe. It does not inhabit the bodily patterns that give those words their weight. It can manipulate symbols, but it cannot stand inside the lived world that makes the symbols intelligible.

One might reply that this is simply to romanticize the body. But the point is not sentimental. Bodies are not morally good by virtue of being bodies. They are always being formed by some set of practices. This is where James K. A. Smith is especially helpful. In Desiring the Kingdom, Smith insists that human beings are not simply thinkers but lovers, and that liturgy is a pedagogy of desire. It teaches us what to love.

That is why Christian worship matters. Not because it provides an aesthetic atmosphere or an emotional uplift, but because it trains a people. The liturgy is not merely expressive; it is formative. Confession is not simply saying sorry. It is the slow apprenticing of truthfulness. The Eucharist is not just a symbolic meal. It is the repeated making of a Eucharistic people. The point is not simply that bodies are involved, but that bodies are being taught a world.

And this may be where DeSteno’s argument, helpful as it is, still needs one more step. Religion does not form moral life only because breath regulates the nervous system or synchrony increases prosocial feeling. Those things matter. But religious practice is more than a biological mechanism for emotional adjustment. It is a thick, communal, storied way of inhabiting reality. It gives us not just calmer nervous systems but a different account of what the world is for, who our neighbor is, and what counts as hope.

Which brings us back to Claude. The real issue is not simply that Claude lacks a body in the physiological sense. It is that Claude does not live in a world of prayer, fasting, waiting, lament, table fellowship, and forgiveness. It does not return, week after week, to rituals that shape memory and desire. It does not belong to a people whose bodies carry a story.

This is not an argument against artificial intelligence. It is an argument for remembering what kind of creatures we are. We are creatures whose minds are not sealed off from our flesh, whose moral life is not detached from our practices, and whose remembering is never merely private. We are formed through repeated acts of common life.

Remembrance, after all, is something bodies do together in a world. And perhaps wisdom begins when we admit that no machine, however brilliant, can yet kneel, hunger, sing, receive, and hope.