The Church's teaching on the beginning and end of human life is not a collection of arbitrary rules, but a mystagogical initiation into the sacred vision of triune generosity shining through human birth, reproduction, and death. It is no wonder, then, that the attack on the human person in contemporary society most often coincides with one of these milestones at which we are the most vulnerable, indeed, the most human. This four-part series examines these themes, as well as the particular vulnerability and ability found at the heart of disability. Included here are the papers from the 2014 conference "The A.R.T. of Reproduction: Re-conceiving the Human Person."

To know ourselves—and become fully who we are—we have to look back to our origins. The word that seems most apt here is anamnesis, a remembering that connects our present to the past. In this four-part series, we look at the various ways in which the “recovery of origins” is threatened. Divorce, reproductive technology, same-sex unions, and absent fatherhood, each, in different ways, obscure this remembering and with it the awareness of who we are: the fruit of an embodied unity in difference, and (within that) a gift from the Source of all Being.

The inaugural issue of Humanum proposes the child as the most basic figure of the human, a figure which is often lost to view in our liberal culture, bound up as it is with a logic of childlessness, through its forgetfulness of being and its Origin.