Past Issues

Birth. Death. What lies in between? A short span, often punctuated by suffering and loneliness. Each of us must wrestle with the “perennial problem of human finitude” (Ratzinger) and face the question of our life’s meaning. Is it good . . . fundamentally? Does it promise anything? Does it keep its promise? Absent hope in a good answer, we try to escape reality with numbing diversions of various kinds—from screens to drugs. We hang on, barely alive. Instead, when we attend to the glimpses of goodness in our existence, it is possible to engage it fully alive in the hope that our finitude will blossom into the abundance of eternal life.

Christians desire a "happy death," one that is neither sudden nor unforeseen. They want to face death prepared: vigilant, amends made, sins confessed, in the company of their loved ones and the saints, all interceding for them at their appointed hour. But such a death is only possible if one is responding to a call from the One who has vivified their lives all along. Absent that, one can only want to be taken unawares or put to sleep "mercifully," then annihilated with the compost. The unhappy deaths we are witnessing today represent not first a moral crisis, but a crisis of meaning.

One year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that there was no constitutional right to abortion. Americans have good reasons to celebrate the rescinding of such a high-ranking entitlement to the murder of unborn children. Yet the Dobbs Decision provided no reason why such a right does not exist. Indeed, by “sending the question back to the states,” SCOTUS suggested that there might well be one. It is as if, in the wake of the Civil War Amendments, the question about when Black people became human, or human enough to be protected under the law, were subjected to a vote. We recoil at the thought. Because we know there are some things that must simply be recognized as given. Our existence is one of them.

In work, says John Paul II, “man participates in the activity of God himself.” He takes part in that “gospel of work” proclaimed by the One who was “a man of work, a craftsman like Joseph of Nazareth” (Laborem Exercens). It is by way of Christ that the human craftsman involves himself with created things, acknowledging their inner goodness, and transforming them to bring out of them a new fruitfulness.

A thing…is inseparable from is context, namely, its world, and from our commerce with the thing and its world, namely engagement. The experience of a thing is always and also a bodily and social engagement with the thing's world. In calling forth a manifold engagement, a thing necessarily provides more than one commodity. Thus a stove used to furnish more than mere warmth. It was a focus, a hearth, a place that gathers the work and leisure of a family and gave the house a center.

—Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life