Past Issues

“Home and Neighborhood” is the last of a three-part series examining the pressures on the family in the contemporary world. With this issue, we move beyond the domestic sphere to include reflections on neighborhood, community, and the impact of the built environment on human relationships.

This issue is the fruit of an ongoing dialogue between the CCPR and a group of doctors at the Mayo clinic concerning the nature of medicine, the nature of the human body, and of the necessary link between health and the religious dimension of the human being.

What is the impact of technology in the home, especially the new information technology, and the social media? Are these technologies rewiring our brains? Is technology really morally neutral? Is it just a tool we use, or can it be said to be using us for its own built-in purposes? What are the implications for home life, for family time, for reading, for the atmosphere in which we live?

This issue is the first of a three-part series on the theme of “Home and the Family.” Here we reflect on the meaning, challenges and joys of motherhood, examine the impact of day care on young children and take part in the recent debate on “work–life balance,” as sparked by Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead and Anne-Marie Slaughter’s influential article on the same topic in The Atlantic.

This issue − the last in our series on recovering origins−takes up that dimension of our coming to be which opens us up to the Origin of all origins. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s said in 2000: “Human fatherhood gives us an anticipation of who God is. But when this fatherhood does not exist, when it is experienced only as a biological phenomenon, without its human and spiritual dimension, all statements about God the Father are empty. The crisis of fatherhood we are living today is an element, perhaps the most important, threatening man in his humanity.”