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Atheism is the Real Climate Denier

Michael Lehmann

The media often covers climate change by focusing on extremes, such as activists stopping traffic to warn of a climate disaster or elected leaders dismissing it entirely. When discussing how climate change impacts human beings, one deeper question escapes attention: Do human beings exist in the first place? The answer might sound obvious. But atheism is the real denier—not just of climate change, but of existence itself. 

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“FI0003879,” Cedar Falls, IA, 1972 by Gary Langebartels/Fortepan IA

The Problem with Our Infinite Appetite for Distractions

Neil Postman

Jeanne Schindler

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Fortepan / Kereki Sándor

“Gender Affirming Professionals” and Transfers of Power: Children and Parents Divided Contra Mundum

Amy E. Hamilton

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Current Issue

Power: Issue Three

Agents of Control

In his 1978 Harvard address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke as a survivor of the terrors of “hard totalitarianism” under the Soviet state, but he warned of a softer version, emerging from different, less obvious agents of control. This “soft totalitarianism,” enforced by the media, the academy, and corporations, was no less dangerous than its communist counterpart; it was undermining the spiritual freedom of the West. Today, there are individuals and institutions—whether totalitarians of some stripe or merely “influencers”—attempting to manipulate what we do, say, and think, often against the claims of conscience and the transcendent moral order. To recover our sense of dignity and agency over against the likes of the biomedical security state, surveillance capital, or gender ideologues, might well, in Solzhenitsyn’s words, “demand from us a spiritual blaze.”

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Humanum is about the human: what makes us human, what keeps us human, and what does not. We are driven by the central questions of human existence: nature, freedom, sexual difference and the fundamental figures to which it gives rise, man, woman, and child. We probe these in the context of marriage, family, education, work, medicine and bioethics, science and technology, political and ecclesial life. We sift through the many competing ideas of our age so that we might “hold fast to what is good” and let go of what is not. In addition to articles, witness pieces, and book reviews ArteFact: Film & Fiction searches out the human in the literary and cinematic arts.

Humanum is published as a free service by the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C.