Loaded Words
In the beginning was the Word. Human beings, made in the image of God, share in this utterance, this Logos. Language, then, is foundational to our humanity. How we reference reality, how we translate from one language to another, how we communicate with one another—notably in an era where social media amplify our every passing thought—matters. Everything, from scientific discourse to the sacred liturgy, hangs on the way we use or abuse language. This issue of Humanum examines the freight that words carry, with particular reference to the “misology” and “cancel culture” that afflict contemporary discourse.
Table of Contents
RE-SOURCE: CLASSIC TEXTS
Robert Spaemann: A Keyhole for Unbelievers? The Public Character of Cultus and the Broadcasting of the Mass on TV
FEATURE ARTICLES
Lawrence P. Herrera S.J.: On Translation
Apolonio Latar III: Unspeakable Loneliness: Cancel Culture and Education
D. C. Schindler: Social Media Is Hate Speech: A Platonic Reflection on Contemporary Misology
WITNESS
Sophie Caldecott: The Internet: How Words Can Unite or Divide Us
BOOK REVIEWS
Olivier-Thomas Venard’s A Poetic Christ: Thomist Reflections on Scripture, Language, and Reality — reviewed by Edward Hadas
Raymond Gawronski’s Word and Silence: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Spiritual Encounter between East and West — reviewed by John Laracy
James Stevens Curl’s Making Distopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism — reviewed by James C. McCrery II
Evelyn Fox Keller’s Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology — reviewed by Lesley Rice
Martin Mosebach’s The Heresy of Formlessness: The Roman Liturgy and Its Enemy and Subversive Catholicism: The Papacy, the Liturgy, and the Church — reviewed by Andrew Shivone