Past Issues

In the beginning was the Word. Human beings, made in the image of God, share in this utterance, this Logos. Language, then, is foundational to our humanity. How we reference reality, how we translate from one language to another, how we communicate with one another—notably in an era where social media amplify our every passing thought—matters. Everything, from scientific discourse to the sacred liturgy, hangs on the way we use or abuse language. This issue of Humanum examines the freight that words carry, with particular reference to the "misology" and "cancel culture" that afflict contemporary discourse.

What is language? We are born into it, already attuned to the rhythm and syntax of our mother tongue. In our first years, we learn it almost miraculously, without a thought. We take it for granted. Language defies evolutionary accounts of its origin and transhumanist dreams of replacement. In a word, it is that uniquely human art form of the incarnate spirits we are; for it is only with words—sensuous symbols—that we can speak of the world. Through words—in all the multiplicity of concrete names and foreign tongues—we are united to the community of inexhaustible beings in the world and to the inexhaustible community of the One who made it.

When a plant grows to maturity, it bears fruit. This comes naturally. In the human situation too, bearing good fruit is not just something we adults are supposed to do, even less something we do only for others. It is something we want to do. We see this in the joy of a mother and father when a child is born and in the satisfaction we feel when we give life to those in need: the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the lonely, the depressed, the addicted. We see it in the faces of the saints; in the face of a woman like Catherine Doherty. The law of charity is inscribed in our very being.

What does it mean to be an adult? Some think of maturity in terms of self-possession. But what if adulthood is actually the condition in which we realize that we do not, in fact, “possess” ourselves? What if being truly adult means being ready and willing to say “I do,” to give ourselves away—wholly and irrevocably—to another? To mature as a human being implies a certain “ripeness,” the ability to bear fruit. But we can only do that when we have made a complete gift of self to another (or Another). That is why we possess ourselves in the first place, to have something to give.

An adult is a grown up, someone who has developed to the point of maturity. He or she has “graduated from school,” so to speak. Now what? The dreaded platitude intoned at every graduation comes to mind: “‘commencement’ means a beginning not an end.” But what is it we are about to begin? Or, better, into what precisely are we about to be initiated? Skepticism? Doubt? Distraction? This issue proposes adulthood as a “school of life” where “students”—now on their own two feet—verify the truth they have been given as they seek it more deeply, and become teachers themselves.