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It is taken for granted by most parents that their children must learn mathematics to have a complete education and grow into competent adults. Moreover, outside of small circles, what comprises an education in mathematics has long been settled and formed into a rigid curriculum. We all know already what math is. And thus, when Paul Lockhart wrote A Mathematician’s Lament, he was well aware that he was up against a deep and strong prejudice.
Artefact Poetry
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.
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.
