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The Wood Thrush

John James Audubon

John James Audubon (1785–1851) is at once the most celebrated American naturalist and one of America’s preeminent painters. He is known for his Birds of America, a monumental edition of engravings of 435 of his paintings published concurrently with his five-volume Ornithological Biography (1831–39), from which the passage below has been selected. The reader of these brief and brilliant essays on birds sees that they match the liveliness of his paintings. An artful naturalist in every way, he preferred to convey information about the life-history and habits of birds through story rather than by encyclopedic description.

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Order: Issue Two

Nature's Order

As we begin to outsource our knowledge of the world to AI, we must remember why it is interesting to know the world in the first place. That must begin with the natural order. As Benedict XVI wrote: “Nature expresses a design of love and truth. It is prior to us, and it has been given to us by God as the setting for our life. Nature speaks to us of the Creator and his love for humanity. It is destined to be ‘recapitulated’ in Christ at the end of time. Thus it too is a ‘vocation.’ Nature is at our disposal not as ‘a heap of scattered refuse,’ but as a gift of the Creator who has given it an inbuilt order, enabling man to draw from it the principles needed in order ‘to till it and keep it’” (Caritas in veritate, 48). With this issue we examine this gift through many lenses: physics, mathematics, biology, astronomy, to name a few.

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Past Issues

Order: Issue One

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“Peace is the tranquility of order,” St. Augustine tells us. And it is notable that the conception of both peace and…
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The principle recognizing the prerogative of parents to educate their children is no longer just a haven from the…
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Authority and Power

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What strange creatures we are! We live fully only as creatures indwelt by an infinite desire. Yet, from within this…
Life: Issue Three

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Life: Issue Two

Now and at the Hour of Our Death

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One year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that there was no constitutional right to abortion. Americans have good…
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Things to Focus On

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Things: Issue One

The Substance of Things

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Identity: Issue Two

Tradition

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I Identify As...

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Loaded Words

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Language: Issue One

Quintessentially Human: Language

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"By Their Fruits..."

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Saying "I Do"

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Entering the School of Life

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Adulthood: Man Fully Alive

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The Body: Issue Four

The Vulnerable Body

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Sex and the Mystery of Being Human

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The Body: Issue Two

Identity and Difference: The Gender Debate

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The Eloquent Body

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Work: Issue Four

A Laborer Is Worthy of His Wages: Work and Justice

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Good Work, Fruitful Rest

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A Labor of Love: Work and the States of Life

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All You Who Labor: The Vocation to Work

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Ecology: Issue Four

Human Ecology: Body and Home

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Ecology: Issue Three

Animals: Man and Beast

The panoply of creatures with which we are surrounded is an expression of the glory of God. Our relationship to that…
Ecology: Issue Two

Tilling and Keeping

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Ecology: Issue One

Integral Ecology: At Home in the World

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Education: Issue Four

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The Education of the Sexes

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Reading, Writing and Arithmetic: A Re-Examination

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Education: First Steps

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The Ability of Disability

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Re-Conceiving the Human Person: the A.R.T. of Reproduction

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Beginning and End of Life

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Home and Neighborhood

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Catholicism and the Future of Medicine

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Technology in the Home

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A Mother's Work

This issue is the first of a three-part series on the theme of “Home and the Family.” Here we reflect on the meaning,…
Origins: Issue Four

Absent Fathers

This issue − the last in our series on recovering origins−takes up that dimension of our coming to be which opens us up…
Origins: Issue Three

Same-Sex Unions

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Artificial Reproductive Technology

This issue− the second in our series on “recovering origins”− is devoted to reviewing artificial reproductive…
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Children of Divorce

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Inaugural Issue

The Child

The inaugural issue of Humanum proposes the child as the most basic figure of the human, a figure which is often lost…

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.