ArteFact

The first time I went birdwatching with an avid birding enthusiast, my guidebook-knowledge transformed into an experience of joy and contemplation. A robin was no longer a familiar bird flittering in my backyard. I could distinguish it now by its song of rippling notes and clear, syllabic whistles. But it wasn’t an ornithologist who helped me notice these subtleties, simply a person in awe of birds who helped refine my senses.

As a child, I walked the streets of Rochester barefoot, my shirt torn and my face covered in soot. If I had read them, which I hadn’t, I could have echoed the words of Pip at the beginning of Great Expectations: “Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea.” However, unlike Pip, I didn’t know true poverty. When I paced the streets of Rochester without any shoes on, I was merely acting in the annual Dickens Festival...

A blessed Christmas and wonderful new year to all of our readers! We hope you enjoy this literary gift to you: a poem from Caitlin Smith Gilson's forthcoming collection, Luminous Darkness: The Passion of the Last Words (Wipf & Stock, 2025).

Long ago I was young
I did not know it then
But it was for you
To be this dying comet of love
Finishing my soul in you...

Though I’m usually watching streamed content on a screen while lounging in a living room, rather than sweating in a sultry Grecian amphitheater, straining to hear the lines of masked actors, what moves me to pity and fear remains remarkably similar to what moved ancient audiences. Mr. Sunshine, originally broadcast in 2018, is one of the Korean shows I’ve enjoyed recently, and one of the highest-rated K-dramas of the past ten years. It is a sageuk, a type of historical drama that has flourished on the Korean silver screen for years, featuring large-scale dilemmas that would be familiar to ancient Greek audiences of tragic dramas.

Peaky Blinders is a popular and well-written crime drama from creator Steven Knight that aired on BBC Two and One from 2013–2022. It is exciting, intricate, sexy and thrilling. But it is more than a historical gangster drama. It is also a thoughtful reflection on freedom, the possibility of redemption, and living in death's shadow.

Christian art faces unique challenges: How is hope realized without sentimentalization? How to resist moralizing when grappling with modern skepticism? How to reveal the mysteries and paradoxes in the pursuit of truth and in reverence of the human person? These were just some of the challenges that Hawke and co-writer Shelby Gaines would face in creating Wildcat, a profoundly Christian film that depicts Mary Flannery O’Connor’s life and her fiction. But rather than appeal to the styles of Hollywood entertainment or rest content in the successes of convention, they chose a path that drew on the very Catholic realism that animates O’Connor’s stories.

“The real protagonist of history is the beggar.” In sharing this insight, Luigi Giussani underscores that real significance lies in the connection and encounter between individuals in their mutual humility, need, and search for fulfillment.

Living, the 2022 British period drama directed by Oliver Hermanus, is a film adapted from Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), itself inspired by Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Like its predecessors, the movie explores a middle-aged bureaucrat’s reaction to his terminal diagnosis (Mr. Williams portrayed by Bill Nighy in a Best Actor Oscar-nominated performance) as he struggles to discern if he has lived a meaningful life and, if not, what he needs to do to correct things. We will see that it is only through an attitude of vulnerability and humility—that of the beggar—that the other is lead to response to these needs.

It is the fall of 1947 on the ruggedly picturesque Cornwall coast, and Reverend Bott must write a sermon. A normal part of the job, yes, but the minister is struggling with this one, for the occasion is particularly challenging. People were dead, others had survived, but he could not exactly deliver a funeral sermon. The bodies in question were already irretrievably buried under a massive, collapsed cliff. All had been guests or employees at the ramshackle seaside hotel at the base when, not without (unheeded) warning, the cliff had fallen, engulfing the inn and all who were inside. What could anyone say in the face of such a tragedy? Thus opens Margaret Kennedy's clever novel, The Feast, originally published in 1950 and re-published recently by Faber & Faber.

Girls have always had dolls. These dolls were models of little girls. Playing with dolls, real girls would play at being mothers. That is, until Barbie: a doll that is simply a woman. In the opening scene of Greta Gerwig's Barbie (2023), Barbie appears (as a ninety-foot-tall Margot Robbie) and we watch as all the little girls smash their girl dolls on the ground. Upon seeing this, I thought to myself: this is abortion, this is contraception, this is independent womanhood opposed to motherhood: this is life (independence, self-standing) against death (separation, motherhood, letting be, being fruitful in another).

Modernity has flattened and fractured our cultural understanding of the human person. Dr. Holly Ordway, Word on Fire’s Cardinal Francis George Professor of Faith and Culture, offers a refreshing counterpoint to this decline in her recent book, Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography. Laying out meticulously researched evidence, she presents J.R.R. Tolkien as a whole man, a man whose faith enlightened his mind and his relations, a man fully alive.