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For Farm and Family: Reflections on Making

Rory Groves

I was eight years old when I wrote my first computer program. It was a random number generator—a small but sure victory for a young child. Sevens, ones, fives, eighteens (and who knows which number next?) were appearing on the screen in all their monochrome glory. I was elated by the fact that I had turned my idea into a reality: I had made something.

It was the beginning of a long career in high tech that would lead me to the unlikeliest of places: farming in rural Minnesota.

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"Hagia Sophia," photo by fusion-of-horizons

Contemplating the Depth of Things: Maximus the Confessor on the Church

Jonathan Bieler

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Issue Three / 2022

In work, says John Paul II, “man participates in the activity of God himself.” He takes part in that “gospel of work” proclaimed by the One who was “a man of work, a craftsman like Joseph of Nazareth” (Laborem Exercens). It is by way of Christ that the human craftsman involves himself with created things, acknowledging their inner goodness, and transforming them to bring out of them a new fruitfulness.

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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.