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

Update your browser

Children of the State: Youth Sexual Rights and the Illusion of Parental Rights

Theresa Farnan

Before routine check-ups, teenagers are handed an iPad with a digital form designed to elicit information about the teenager’s sexual activity, drug use, and mental health. Teens are told to fill the questionnaire out on their own. Parents are not told how their child answered these sensitive questions—nor is there a sign informing parents of their rights to direct the upbringing of their children... 

Continue Reading
"A Girl Reading a Candle by Candlelight," Joseph  Wright

"Gentlemen Don’t Read Each Other’s Mail"*: Notes on Surveillance

Karl MacMillan

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.