Your web browser is out of date. Update your browser for more security, speed and the best experience on this site.

Update your browser

“Gender Affirming Professionals” and Transfers of Power: Children and Parents Divided Contra Mundum

Amy E. Hamilton

There is almost no rival to the power that gender ideology seeks to wield. It seeks nothing less than god-like power, using language not to clarify what is real but to divide, disrupt, and disorient. It cleaves body and soul (“gender identity”), bringing not peace but a sword. Gender ideology does not deal in objective material facts or diagnosable physical conditions but presents an alternative worldview about the truth and the nature of the human person.

Continue Reading
Yeşim Ağaoğlu, "Big Brother Is Watching Us" (2006)

Huxley v. Orwell? The Orwellian Fist in the Huxleyan Glove

John Waters

Read Full Article
1024px Eating Alone CROP 1

Eating Alone: Leaving the Table, Losing Community

Kalamos Vradygraphou

Read Full Article
Current Issue

Power: Issue Three

Agents of Control

In his 1978 Harvard address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke as a survivor of the terrors of “hard totalitarianism” under the Soviet state, but he warned of a softer version, emerging from different, less obvious agents of control. This “soft totalitarianism,” enforced by the media, the academy, and corporations, was no less dangerous than its communist counterpart; it was undermining the spiritual freedom of the West. Today, there are individuals and institutions—whether totalitarians of some stripe or merely “influencers”—attempting to manipulate what we do, say, and think, often against the claims of conscience and the transcendent moral order. To recover our sense of dignity and agency over against the likes of the biomedical security state, surveillance capital, or gender ideologues, might well, in Solzhenitsyn’s words, “demand from us a spiritual blaze.”

View Issue

Past Issues

Humanum is about the human: what makes us human, what keeps us human, and what does not. We are driven by the central questions of human existence: nature, freedom, sexual difference and the fundamental figures to which it gives rise, man, woman, and child. We probe these in the context of marriage, family, education, work, medicine and bioethics, science and technology, political and ecclesial life. We sift through the many competing ideas of our age so that we might “hold fast to what is good” and let go of what is not. In addition to articles, witness pieces, and book reviews ArteFact: Film & Fiction searches out the human in the literary and cinematic arts.

Humanum is published as a free service by the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C.