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It is customary today to divide Catholics into progressives and conservatives, as if these were the two main ways of living in the Church and as if this opposition could clarify everything. Is this a correct point of view or does it imply a reduction of reality that prevents us from understanding it? And, if so, what alternative is left?
We talk incessantly now about identities. But built as they are upon the ruins of our actual selves, the ones embedded in given natural (and supernatural) bonds, we have ceased to have any identity at all. Living in the tiny crawl spaces of our own wills, shut off from anything outside their artificial boundaries, our individuality is wiped out. But if we are still alive and kicking it is because we subsist on the remnant vapors of Tradition with a capital “T,” that heritage of truth that originates in God’s creative Word. It is also because that same Word, mercifully handed over to us in the flesh of the Church, invites us back to our very selves.
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.
