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Studio Interior 1, Stanisław Wyspiański

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.

Film Fiction Theatre Music Poetry
Review |  Music

Grounded: Power in Opera

Commissioned for the opening of the 2024–25 Metropolitan Opera season, Grounded is an adaptation of George Brant’s widely acclaimed play of the same name. Created and composed by Jeanine Tesori, the opera was originally performed at the Washington National Opera in 2023 with Jess played by mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo and tenor Ben Bliss as Jess’s husband Eric. The opera serves as a powerful commentary on power and those who both wield it and are controlled by it in turn.

Article |  Fiction

Recovering Divine Love and Moral Treasures in Pinocchio

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.

Article |  Fiction

Power and Poverty: Charles Dickens in the 21st Century

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...

Article |  Film

Aristotle, Meet Mr. Sunshine

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.

Review |  Film

Redeeming Our Attention

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.

Review |  Film

Broken Beggars

“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.

Humanum: Issues in Family, Culture & Science
Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family
620 Michigan Ave. N.E. (McGivney Hall)
Washington, DC 20064