The current Friday Feature
duration 26:23
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Latest wisdom from Sound Thinking
- An ancient liturgical form
Calvin Stapert on the long history of recounting Christ’s sufferings musically - Bach’s meditative intensity
Victor Lederer on the intimate spirituality in Bach’s St. Matthew Passion - The innocent Lamb’s suffering
Jaroslav Pelikan on the theology of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion - The idiom for the revelation of mystery
Dana Gioia on the foundational place of poetry in Christian faith - Breaking the frozen sea
Dana Gioia on how poetry enchants
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Related Features
Diverting language
The power of language
Love and words
Being, knowing, speaking
Meet our newest Partner
Humanum is about the human: what makes us human, what keeps us human, and what does not. The journal is 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. Humanum probes these in the context of marriage, family, education, work, medicine and bioethics, science and technology, political and ecclesial life. It sifts through the many competing ideas of our age in order to “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.
On this page, you can browse a listing of essays that Humanum has made available as Features for Mars Hill Audio members.
A recent Conversation
For poet and Eastern Orthodox believer Scott Cairns, a good poem functions like an icon: it assists the process of our becoming aware of what is real, and it is generative in the ways it keeps opening up new understandings. This happens as we “lean in” to the presence of the poem (or icon), engaging with its questions, its allusions, its world — and experience the birth of something new from that encounter. Cairns calls this “sacramental poetics.” In this Conversation, he argues that words have substance and agency, and he explains how he helps his students to become attentive to language and to engage with the historical and ongoing literary conversation. As proof of the stand-alone power of words, he argues that the meaning of the poem can transcend the original scope of its author. Cairns also shares why writing some poems in the voice of a fictional persona helps him to deal with the darker, more troubling parts of Scripture. Cairns is the author of many collections, including the volume that was the occasion for this conversation, Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected (Paraclete, 2006).
The 18 most recent Conversations and Features we’ve released are described here.
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Our most recent Journal
Guests on Volume 164
- DANA GIOIA, curator of Sentences of Seneca, on Seneca’s practical wisdom
- BRADY STILLER, author of Your Life Is a Story: G. K. Chesterton and the Paradox of Freedom, on the grand cosmic story
- ROBERT ROYAL discusses Romano Guardini’s The World and the Person and Other Writings
- RICHARD DECLUE, author of The Mind of Benedict XVI: A Theology of Communion, on the former pope’s priority on relationality
- TIFFANY SCHUBERT, author of Jane Austen’s Romantic Medievalism: Courtly Love and Happy Endings, on 18th-century cultural superiority
- JOONAS SILDRE, author of Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey to His Musical Language, on illustrating Pärt’s music