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Artefact Film

Loving Small Rooms

Matthew John Paul Tan

Our cities are heaving and continuously getting bigger. Around the world, cities continue to be magnets of desire, with ever-growing numbers of people flocking to them with dreams of finding better lives for themselves and their families. Many make this work and find in cities the fulfillment of what they sought. Many others do not. Woven into the stories of these urban dwellers—perhaps even in the most successful of these—are varying combinations of isolating dislocation, receding hopes, and most of all, frenetic competition with other city dwellers, for jobs, salaries, foodstuffs, dwellings, even toilet paper. 

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The Astronomical Clock (Orloj) in Prague. Photo credit: Jerzy Strzelecki

Celestial Signposts: Astronomical Orientation and the Ordering of Human Life

Mary Taylor

Orchid mantis, photographed by Mark Dumont.

Natural Will and the Struggle for Existence: Finding Order in an Evolving World

Robert A. Marsland III

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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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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.