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The Father Brings About the Order: Blade Runner (1982) and Ferdinand Ulrich on the Theological Apriori of Atheism

Jonathan Bieler

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. Based on this principle of the connection between life and order, the present essay ventures into the notion of life prevalent in modernity and the kind of order generated thereby. 

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Current Issue

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

Power: Issue Four

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Power: Issue One

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"The eclipse of the idea of authority is an essential characteristic of today’s world; in fact, it is the most…
Life: Issue Four

Transcendence vs. Transition: Finite Creatures and the Desire for the Infinite

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Identity: Issue Three

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Identity: Issue One

I Identify As...

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Loaded Words

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Adulthood: Issue Two

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Adulthood: Issue One

Adulthood: Man Fully Alive

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Identity and Difference: The Gender Debate

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The Eloquent Body

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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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Animals: Man and Beast

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The Ability of Disability

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Inaugural Issue

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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.