ArteFact

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.

Stargazer in Bethlehem

You looked back at me
In the split second before heartbreak
Claimed what remains of my creation

At the very moment
My arms and legs
Readied themselves for starless night
You became more real
Than earth revolving around sun...

Will Arbery’s 2019 play Heroes of the Fourth Turning received significant critical attention after its release, with both left- and right-leaning media seeing it as a hermeneutic for understanding the role played by American Catholic conservatism in the election of Donald Trump. However, the play has received little recognition for its more incisive anthropological and ecclesiological insights.

Time rules over man. It propels him through life, which is short when compared with eternity, and ushers him through life’s events, which often seem inconsequential beside history’s kings and wars. All of man’s experiences exist in and through time, and the means by which man communicates these experiences and thoughts—language—is also temporally bound. The nature of a novel, a poem, a sentence, or even a word, signals its mortality. It exists in time; it begins, and it ends.

Last summer, Netflix released the fourth and penultimate season of the sci-fi horror drama Stranger Things to widespread rave reviews. Many fans saw this latest installment as a return to the exceptional storytelling of the show’s first season. For those of us with an interest in theology, it provided a compelling exploration of the age-old battle between good and evil that resonates with Catholic spirituality.