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The bucket in the laundry room
is stored up on the highest shelf
and labeled, in black marker, MOM—
with six kids lugging water out
to chickens, goats, and grazing sheep,
our buckets tend to disappear.
Tonight, my husband fills it up
with water, lukewarm like the baths
we used to draw for curling newborns
in our apartment’s kitchen sink...
The principle recognizing the prerogative of parents to educate their children is no longer just a haven from the tyranny of the State. The “right” itself has become an arbitrary claim, with “gender-affirming” parents appealing to it as proxies of their children’s “right to choose.” And the “parents” bearing the right are, increasingly, those who choose children—producing and buying them—not the ones who have them. Unless parents’ rights are grounded in the authority mothers and fathers possess as participants in a prevenient natural order, to which they themselves are beholden and for which they are responsible, it will become the arena of a lesser known, yet no less terrible, tyranny: the Huxleyan tyranny of our own desires.
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.
