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Circular Order in Biology

Susan Waldstein

There are many kinds of order in the realm of living things. Some, like day and night and the four seasons are so obvious we hardly think of them as systems of order. What are some of the other systems of order? Where does the order in each instance come from? What is the relation between the lower orders and the higher ones? Does this order point to something beyond itself, a principle of the overarching order in nature? 

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The Astronomical Clock (Orloj) in Prague. Photo credit: Jerzy Strzelecki

Celestial Signposts: Astronomical Orientation and the Ordering of Human Life

Mary Taylor

Current Issue

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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Past Issues

Order: Issue One

On the Order of Things

“Peace is the tranquility of order,” St. Augustine tells us. And it is notable that the conception of both peace and…
Power: Issue Four

"He Gave Them Power and Authority"

What authority does the pope have and why should we obey? How is the papacy, which is still a stumbling block for so…
Power: Issue Three

Agents of Control

In his 1978 Harvard address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke as a survivor of the terrors of “hard totalitarianism” under…
U.S. v. Skrmetti Special Issue

U.S. v. Skrmetti: Debating Reality

Clifford Geertz once observed that law is a way of “imagining the real,” that it offers “visions of community” rather…
Power: Issue Two

Parents' Rights

The principle recognizing the prerogative of parents to educate their children is no longer just a haven from the…
Power: Issue One

Authority and Power

"The eclipse of the idea of authority is an essential characteristic of today’s world; in fact, it is the most…
Life: Issue Four

Transcendence vs. Transition: Finite Creatures and the Desire for the Infinite

What strange creatures we are! We live fully only as creatures indwelt by an infinite desire. Yet, from within this…
Life: Issue Three

Barely Alive ... Fully Alive

Birth. Death. What lies in between? A short span, often punctuated by suffering and loneliness. Each of us must wrestle…
Life: Issue Two

Now and at the Hour of Our Death

Christians desire a "happy death," one that is neither sudden nor unforeseen. They want to face death prepared:…
Life: Issue One

Life and Law: Dare We Hope in Dobbs?

One year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that there was no constitutional right to abortion. Americans have good…
Things: Issue Three

Value Added

In work, says John Paul II, “man participates in the activity of God himself.” He takes part in that “gospel of work”…
Things: Issue Two

Things to Focus On

A thing…is inseparable from is context, namely, its world, and from our commerce with the thing and its world, namely…
Things: Issue One

The Substance of Things

Human life is saturated with the experience of objects. We are, at all times, surrounded by things, whether made or…
Identity: Issue Three

I Am a Political Animal

Since I am a political animal, my identity is inseparable from the polity to which I belong. But in which city do I…
Identity: Issue Two

Tradition

We talk incessantly now about identities. But built as they are upon the ruins of our actual selves, the ones embedded…
Identity: Issue One

I Identify As...

We used to know ourselves by looking to what was most familiar—to our bodies, families, customs, and traditions. Who we…
Language: Issue Four

Imagining the Real: Poetry, Story, Myth

Poiesis delights and entertains us. A novel, a play, a myth retold, even a song: true art is never mere entertainment.…
Language: Issue Three

Telling Lies

A society no longer bound by an underlying universal logos is bound only by an irrational rebellion against reality, by…
Language: Issue Two

Loaded Words

In the beginning was the Word. Human beings, made in the image of God, share in this utterance, this Logos. Language,…
Language: Issue One

Quintessentially Human: Language

What is language? We are born into it, already attuned to the rhythm and syntax of our mother tongue. In our first…
Adulthood: Issue Four

"By Their Fruits..."

When a plant grows to maturity, it bears fruit. This comes naturally. In the human situation too, bearing good fruit is…
Adulthood: Issue Three

Saying "I Do"

What does it mean to be an adult? Some think of maturity in terms of self-possession. But what if adulthood is actually…
Adulthood: Issue Two

Entering the School of Life

An adult is a grown up, someone who has developed to the point of maturity. He or she has “graduated from school,” so…
Adulthood: Issue One

Adulthood: Man Fully Alive

A troubling new trend suggests that instead of being an adult, it is sufficient “to adult” when necessary—that is, to…
The Body: Issue Four

The Vulnerable Body

To be embodied is to be vulnerable. Vulnerability strikes us as negative and with reason, rooted as it is in the word…
The Body: Issue Three

Sex and the Mystery of Being Human

As the late political philosopher Augusto Del Noce said, the sexual revolution was the most revolutionary because it…
The Body: Issue Two

Identity and Difference: The Gender Debate

Over thirty years ago, French feminist Luce Irigaray, wrote: "Sexual difference is one of the important questions of…
The Body: Issue One

The Eloquent Body

The human body—the “thing” that accompanies us wherever we go—is central to most of the burning questions in our…
Work: Issue Four

A Laborer Is Worthy of His Wages: Work and Justice

With this last issue on work we come to the question of justice in all that concerns work: the one doing the work—the…
Work: Issue Three

Good Work, Fruitful Rest

We are well aware of the degrading characteristic of much of today’s work among the new class of “knowledge workers,”…
Work: Issue Two

A Labor of Love: Work and the States of Life

When we consider the question of work, we have to consider the context in which our humanity flourishes: the family,…
Work: Issue One

All You Who Labor: The Vocation to Work

Work is so common that it is easy not to think about it...other than how to get around it, be treated justly for it, be…
Ecology: Issue Four

Human Ecology: Body and Home

It was Pope Benedict XVI who turned our attention to human ecology: “The book of nature is one and indivisible: it…
Ecology: Issue Three

Animals: Man and Beast

The panoply of creatures with which we are surrounded is an expression of the glory of God. Our relationship to that…
Ecology: Issue Two

Tilling and Keeping

In our second issue on ecology we take up the first work of man in the garden: tilling and keeping. Here we consider…
Ecology: Issue One

Integral Ecology: At Home in the World

As the debate about the environment continues, Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ demonstrated how the catholic perspective can…
Education: Issue Four

Google That! Education and Technology

We do not wish to hyperventilate about technology. But neither do we wish to succumb to it uncritically as though it…
Education: Issue Three

The Education of the Sexes

"The fragmentation of education into disciplines teaches us that the world is made of bits we can use and consume as we…
Education: Issue Two

Reading, Writing and Arithmetic: A Re-Examination

Against the backdrop of an educational culture resembling “one wild divorce court,” Chesterton’s exhortation to return…
Education: Issue One

Education: First Steps

A child has to be “brought up,” and “led out” into the world. But what does this mean against the dominant backdrop of…
Health: Issue Three

The Ability of Disability

In many ways it is disability—its disfigurement, impairment, vulnerability and dependence—which raises the objection we…
Health: Issue Two

Re-Conceiving the Human Person: the A.R.T. of Reproduction

Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) provoke fundamental questions which cannot be suppressed…questions about…
Health: Issue One

Beginning and End of Life

The first of our four-part series on Health and Medicine, this issue probes the mystery found at the beginning and end…
Home: Issue Three

Home and Neighborhood

“Home and Neighborhood” is the last of a three-part series examining the pressures on the family in the contemporary…
Health: Issue Four

Catholicism and the Future of Medicine

This issue is the fruit of an ongoing dialogue between the CCPR and a group of doctors at the Mayo clinic concerning…
Home: Issue Two

Technology in the Home

What is the impact of technology in the home, especially the new information technology, and the social media? Are…
Home: Issue One

A Mother's Work

This issue is the first of a three-part series on the theme of “Home and the Family.” Here we reflect on the meaning,…
Origins: Issue Four

Absent Fathers

This issue − the last in our series on recovering origins−takes up that dimension of our coming to be which opens us up…
Origins: Issue Three

Same-Sex Unions

With this issue−the third in our series of “recovering origins”− we take up another one of the dimensions to which our…
Origins: Issue Two

Artificial Reproductive Technology

This issue− the second in our series on “recovering origins”− is devoted to reviewing artificial reproductive…
Origins: Issue One

Children of Divorce

This issue is the first of our four-part series on “recovering origins,” where we consider the various dimensions of…
Inaugural Issue

The Child

The inaugural issue of Humanum proposes the child as the most basic figure of the human, a figure which is often lost…

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.