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El Greco, "The Laocoön" (crop)

The Human Figure in Art: Watch Now!

Things: Issue Two

Humanum is delighted to offer a video recording of our first in-person event, a presentation by Dr. Sarah Bond on "The Human Figure in Art," to all of our readers. Click here to enjoy it in its entirety.

The presentation took place on April 14, 2023 at the John Paul II Shrine in Washington, D.C.

We thank all who attended and helped make it a success!



Posted on April 28, 2023

Recommended Reading

"The Long Watch," B. M. Hazeltine

Awaiting the Wood Thrush

Christopher Blum

Although I cannot recall when I first learned to recognize the song of the Wood Thrush, I think it must have been a friend who was an accomplished naturalist who taught me to do so. I am keenly aware that well into my 30s, I still had no notion that there was such a thing as a Wood Thrush, nor had I learned its lovely song.  In the two decades since becoming acquainted with it, I have had the delight of hearing the Wood Thrush (Hylocichla mustelina) in a variety of wooded settings, from Minnesota to New Jersey, on bluffs overlooking the Missouri River and on similar bluffs above the Shenandoah. And once—just once—I have seen one.

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Konrad Adenauer in 1965.

Comparing Subsidiarity in America v. Germany

Paul Cupp

For a nation built on the ideal of individual liberty, America has a bureaucracy problem. Perhaps no other nation has ever prided itself so much on the principle of individual liberty while also relying on a centralized Leviathan to administer its political apparatus. I don’t mean to say that it is the most bureaucratized nation (it is outdone by both France, China, and others in that regard), but the United States has a unique blind spot about the proportions of its bureaucracy, and this represents a contradiction in its public philosophy.

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Cecil W. Stoughton, Demonstration in Washington, D.C. (1970)

The Roots of American Disorder

Michael Hanby

There are few honest people of any political persuasion, and perhaps no serious ones, who would say that they are happy with what our nation has become. The United States is now a bloated technocratic empire bearing little resemblance to the democratic republic envisioned by its Founders. We are still nominally governed by our eighteenth-century Constitution, but the real sovereignty of this vast, centerless regime seems to be diffused among a multitude of governmental and para-governmental agencies, each with its own mechanisms of enforcement and which together comprise a complex organism that somehow gives each of us unprecedented power while nevertheless leaving us powerless. 

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Humanum: Issues in Family, Culture & Science
Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family
620 Michigan Ave. N.E. (McGivney Hall)
Washington, DC 20064