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Artefact Poetry

Deo Gratias: Remembering Wendell Berry

Carla Galdo

The poem that follows and this short note of remembrance are “grace notes.” They are just the slightest sounds offered in the midst of the larger, fuller, more ringing memorials to Wendell Erdman Berry, who passed away on August 31, 2026, at the age of 92. Berry, as described by those who knew and loved him most dearly—his family and local community—was simply “a writer and farmer of Port Royal, Henry County, Kentucky.” This was the uncomplicated essence of Wendell Berry, although he was also a cultural critic, an advocate for attending carefully, and with affection, to one’s place in the natural, familial, and economic world. 

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Crops grown in 2018 in an area of northeast Kansas. Corn fields are demarcated by yellow, soybeans green and winter wheat brown. NASA Earth Observatory image by Michala Garrison, using Cropland data from USDA NASS and Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Rediscovering the Roots of Regenerative Agriculture

Stephen McGinley

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Order: Issue Two

Nature's Order

As we begin to outsource our knowledge of the world to AI, we must remember why it is interesting to know the world in the first place. That must begin with the natural order. As Benedict XVI wrote: “Nature expresses a design of love and truth. It is prior to us, and it has been given to us by God as the setting for our life. Nature speaks to us of the Creator and his love for humanity. It is destined to be ‘recapitulated’ in Christ at the end of time. Thus it too is a ‘vocation.’ Nature is at our disposal not as ‘a heap of scattered refuse,’ but as a gift of the Creator who has given it an inbuilt order, enabling man to draw from it the principles needed in order ‘to till it and keep it’” (Caritas in veritate, 48). With this issue we examine this gift through many lenses: physics, mathematics, biology, astronomy, to name a few.

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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.