ArteFact

The short story “Leaf by Niggle” is Tolkien’s most sustained autobiographical work reflecting on his relationship with his art. It provides unique insight into how Tolkien conceived of the proper relation between one’s “creations” and the rest of one’s life. The story portrays an artist named Niggle, a painter whose main flaws are his kind heart, which makes him “uncomfortable” in front of other people’s problems, and his perfectionism, which leaves him consistently dissatisfied with his own work.

Music is an unfolding of time. Indeed, music is an art uniquely suited to the exploration of time. We experience time not as a series of disparate moments, loosely joined together by circumstance, but as a revealing, a gathering of life and knowledge together into an anticipable, symphonic whole. Through the unveiling of their music, composers uniquely speak to the mystery of our being in process, of our being accompanied in the movement toward an ultimate end.

The luminous novel Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, takes the form of a book-length epistle from a Congregationalist minister to his seven year old son...

It is not easy to convey the notion of vocation in a secular world. Modern men and women tend to think of life as consisting in a series of choices, to be made by the individual in a linear fashion, according to what attracts or repulses them...

By the time the massive Three Gorges Dam was nearing its completion in the mid-2000’s, whole towns and villages had already disappeared beneath the waters of the Yangtze River...

Two works written and directed by one of the most profound living film-makers were recently released within two years: The Tree of Life and To the Wonder...