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Catholic historian Christopher Dawson coined the following phrase: “From the very dawn of primitive culture men have attempted, in however crude and symbolic a form, to understand the laws of life, and to adapt their social activity to their workings." At the beginning of any culture and its order thus stands a certain conception of life and its origin.
Artefact Fiction
“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.
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.
