Past Issues

When we consider the question of work, we have to consider the context in which our humanity flourishes: the family, the religious community, the monastery. Each of these contexts are grounded in an irrevocable bond of love open to mutual fruitfulness, a state of life. They are quite literally the illustration of the common good. In each state of life, therefore, the question of work takes on its rightful meaning, its place in the great scheme of things.

Work is so common that it is easy not to think about it...other than how to get around it, be treated justly for it, be better remunerated for it, or remunerated at all, in the event of unemployment. Indeed, unemployment has a great deal of our attention now. Pope Francis made everyone's head turn when he made the startling claim that one of "the most serious evils that afflict the world these days is unemployment." Was this mere hyperbole? What about the dissolution of the family? The attacks on human life? The loss of the sense of God? And yet, one detects that the problem of unemployment touches on something essential to the human person, obliging us to ask a more fundamental question: What exactly is work?

It was Pope Benedict XVI who turned our attention to human ecology: “The book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development.” Given our general blindness to that ecology, and the toxic cost of such negligence, we turn to the environment that man is and the one in which he dwells―the body and the home―the environments in which he was first welcomed and into which he, in turn, will welcome others.

The panoply of creatures with which we are surrounded is an expression of the glory of God. Our relationship to that world is thus infused with respect: not because we worship nature, but because we worship God through the very creation which manifests him, and is sanctified all over again by his incarnation as a human being at the heart of it. Something which gives a particular signification to the role of man as pivotal in this hierarchy.

In our second issue on ecology we take up the first work of man in the garden: tilling and keeping. Here we consider two questions which that work raises: about the relationship between the garden and the gardener, and about who—or what—is at the center of it all. The last question usually gets caught up in the either-or of the two bad alternatives: unchecked human dominion of nature, on the one hand, and the misanthropy which plagues so much of the environmentalist response to it. This issue explores another way.