Annual Themes

The family home is the place where the child is brought up. It is where he or she is first introduced to reality, beginning with the reality of familial relations themselves and their primacy with respect to the State and the Market. In this three-part series, we look at the current challenges to the home as a place of life, nourishment, education, play, work, even industry. We look at motherhood and work, technology in the home, and the growing suburban isolation of the home.

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.