The current Friday Feature
duration 31:00
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Latest wisdom from Sound Thinking
- Contemplative, receptive, tender, graceful
Byung-Chul Han on the true shape of hope - From Descartes to Nietzsche
Leszek Kolakowski on Cartesian rationality and modernity’s loss of meaning - Seeking to know “how truth herself stands”
Arvin Vos on how appreciating the fruitfulness of Aquinas’s work requires a recognition of his method - A brief for “prophetic Thomism”
David Decosimo on assuming a charitable posture toward pagan virtue - The collaboration of bodies and minds
F. C. Copleston on Aquinas’s confidence in the embodied nature of knowledge
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Related Features
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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.
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A recent Conversation
In January 2026, D. C. Schindler gave a lecture in which he argues that misology — hatred for reason and contempt for language — is a deep cause of our current cultural crisis. He leads his listeners in a contemplative reflection of the nature of words and language, their connection to reason and truth, and their essentiality to human nature. Schindler then considers how misology has become a deeply rooted cultural form, a way of being in which almost everyone is entrapped. If the purpose of words is to make reality clear and manifest, then we pervert the nature of language by seeing it merely as a tool. Schindler draws on Plato and Josef Pieper to argue that language is the medium — indeed, even the home — of human existence and communion. He explores the consequences of our current deformation regarding language, particularly in the areas of social media and so-called “artificial intelligence.” When we deceive ourselves by using the words “intelligence” and “language” to describe the functioning and output of large language models (LLMs), we collude in the reduction of our own humanity. An adequate response to this cultural crisis requires the cultivation of virtue, as well as a commitment to name reality with care and to truly converse together, delighting in reality and the truth of being itself.
The 18 most recent Conversations and Features we’ve released are described here.
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Our most recent Journal
Guests on Volume 167
- NICHOLAS CARR, author of Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, on how social media affects our brains and our relationships
- THOMAS WARD, author of After Stoicism: Last Words of the Last Roman Philosopher, on Boethius — the Christian — and Stoicism
- JOSEPH STUART, author of Christopher Dawson: A Cultural Mind in the Age of the Great War, on Dawson’s forgotten legacy
- STEVEN KNEPPER & ROBERT WYLLIE, authors of Byung-Chul Han: A Critical Introduction, on key themes in the contemporary philosopher’s work
- EPHRAIM RADNER, author of Mortal Goods: Reimagining Christian Political Duty, on the flawed modern narrative of ‘‘betterment”
- ANDREW WILLARD JONES, author of The Church Against the State: On Subsidiarity and Sovereignty, on reality, friendship, and analogical participation