Past Issues

Against the backdrop of an educational culture resembling “one wild divorce court,” Chesterton’s exhortation to return to “the whole truth of a thing” sums up the cluster of concerns in this issue on schooling: unity with history, unity with the truth of the world, and unity with God.

A child has to be “brought up,” and “led out” into the world. But what does this mean against the dominant backdrop of calling into question the essential features of childhood? What exactly is the child’s relation to the world, and how exactly is that relation mediated by the “first educators” of the child, his or her parents? The answer to these questions will determine what we intend when we educate and what it is we are aiming at in bringing a child to adulthood.

In many ways it is disability—its disfigurement, impairment, vulnerability and dependence—which raises the objection we have to life at its beginning and end. It is disability that we want to avoid. For this reason then we turn to disability directly, to ask to what extent the anomaly of disability casts a light onto one of the central features of the humanum as such…. to what extent, that is, it is an ability.

Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) provoke fundamental questions which cannot be suppressed…questions about human identity and human origins, about motherhood and fatherhood, about the human body and human nature itself. ARTs will have an enormous impact on the future shape of society, on whether and to what extent our children’s children live under some sort of technological totalitarianism. In this issue we take up these momentous questions, by presenting the papers from the CCPR’s 2014 conference: “The ART of Reproduction: Re-Conceiving the Human Person.”

The first of our four-part series on Health and Medicine, this issue probes the mystery found at the beginning and end of life. It seems no coincidence that it is also this issue that marks the final farewell to our founding editor, Stratford Caldecott, who passed away on July 17 after a protracted battle with cancer. He is greatly missed.