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Nick Cave and Life After Death(s)

Nathan Bradford Williams

Death has been a constant theme for Nick Cave over the six decades of his career. Take the vampiric look of the man himself: dressed in dark suits, shirt sans tie and open to mid-sternum, a build best described as skeletal, and long greased black hair coming out of a high-domed pallid pate. Cave’s appearance, combined with the distinctive baritone, and the backing of the Bad Seeds, makes for an emotive stage presence.

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“FI0003879,” Cedar Falls, IA, 1972 by Gary Langebartels/Fortepan IA

The Problem with Our Infinite Appetite for Distractions

Neil Postman

Jeanne Schindler

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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.”

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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.