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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 Poetry

Deo Gratias: Remembering Wendell Berry

Carla Galdo

The poem that follows and this short note of remembrance are “grace notes.” They are just the slightest sounds offered in the midst of the larger, fuller, more ringing memorials to Wendell Erdman Berry, who passed away on August 31, 2026, at the age of 92. Berry, as described by those who knew and loved him most dearly—his family and local community—was simply “a writer and farmer of Port Royal, Henry County, Kentucky.” This was the uncomplicated essence of Wendell Berry, although he was also a cultural critic, an advocate for attending carefully, and with affection, to one’s place in the natural, familial, and economic world. 

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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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