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When Katy Faust began writing about the importance of married mothers and fathers for the well-being of children, she didn’t know it would launch her life’s most significant professional work. It began as an online endeavor in 2012, with an anonymous blog where she posted her thoughts on cultural issues, such as the rising conversation surrounding the legality of same-sex “marriage.”
Clifford Geertz once observed that law is a way of “imagining the real,” that it offers “visions of community” rather than “echoes of it.” If so, then the gender debates represent more than clashes between interest groups. At stake: what do we think is real?
This special edition presents some of the papers given at a recent colloquium on U.S. v. Skrmetti, to be decided by the Supreme Court, probably in June. The case concerns a Tennessee law prohibiting the use of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones on children. However the decision turns out, it will have profound implications.
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.
