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David Adams Richards: A (Catholic) Novelist for Our Time

Andrew T. J. Kaethler

Leading up to Lent 2013 I was, metaphorically speaking, journeying toward Rome from Canterbury. My heart and mind were conforming to a new way of feeling and thinking, and I wanted my imagination to follow suit. To help with this I searched online for a novel written by a Catholic. I was already familiar with Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh. I wanted something new. After looking at a few online lists, I happened upon David Adams Richards’s Mercy Among the Children, which co-won the Giller Prize with Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.

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Order: Issue One

On the Order of Things

“Peace is the tranquility of order,” St. Augustine tells us. And it is notable that the conception of both peace and order in his famous dictum transcends the political in the narrow sense. Rather, the Bishop of Hippo was getting to the roots of the question, to the foundational arrangement of all things in divine wisdom and love. Peace, then, requires an attunement to the order of the cosmos, from the atomic to the astronomic. In a world marked by disorder in virtually every sphere, it behooves us, no less than Augustine, to explore the wellspring of peace to be found in the order of creation.

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Past Issues

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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.