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Artefact

A Spotlight on Culture

Through reviews and longer articles, ArteFact keeps a finger on the pulse of how our culture is reflecting on itself.

article Film

Loving Small Rooms

Matthew John Paul Tan

Our cities are heaving and continuously getting bigger. Around the world, cities continue to be magnets of desire, with ever-growing numbers of people flocking to them with dreams of finding better lives for themselves and their families. Many make this work and find in cities the fulfillment of what they sought. Many others do not. Woven into the stories of these urban dwellers—perhaps even in the most successful of these—are varying combinations of isolating dislocation, receding hopes, and most of all, frenetic competition with other city dwellers, for jobs, salaries, foodstuffs, dwellings, even toilet paper. 

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Article |  Fiction

Seeking Certainty in Uncertain Times: Two Historical Novels

Lucy Beckett’s novel The Time Before You Die: A Novel of the Reformation effectively conveys a queasy, uncomfortable immediacy to the whiplash-inducing movements of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and subsequent backlash against the Counter-Reformation, in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. Several centuries later, Philip Trower’s A Danger to the State depicts the consequences of the Reformation in the full bloom of the Enlightenment - one of which is that religious truths increasingly serve politically expedient realities.

Humanum: Issues in Family, Culture & Science
Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family
620 Michigan Ave. N.E. (McGivney Hall)
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