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A Braver, Newer World

John-Paul Heil

How far would you go to avoid pain? Would you let someone else die in order not to feel it? Of course you wouldn’t. No one with a half-functioning conscience would say that. But there are other ways…
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"Contemplation of Justice" Statue on the Supreme Court Plaza, by James Earle Fraser

Supreme Confusion: The Supreme Court “Does” Transgenderism

Hadley Arkes

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Fortepan / Horváth Ernő

Setting the Terms of the Debate: How Trans Activists Shape Judicial Language

Kathleen Barceleau

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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.