ArteFact

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.

Morris West, The Devil’s Advocate (William Morrow & Co, 1959).

'To be or not to be, that is the question' voices an even more universal problem than King Lear's: not so much about identity, as being.

In nostalgic conversations among friends over favorite childhood literary characters, I inevitably propose Edmund Pevensie from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Much enthusiasm meets this choice. We all agree that as much as we admire the older Peter, Edmund is more interesting.

At first sight, Dorothy L. Sayers’ character Lord Peter Wimsey, does not strike one as a particularly Christian gentleman... And yet, he displays virtues that only caritas and humility can bring to flower.

Wemmick is a man divided. Divided between work and Walworth, where he lives out an idyllic denial of all that is dehumanising about his workaday existence.

A common criticism of Dickens is that his female characters never rise above being two-dimensional. However amongst the demure angels and the grotesque caricatures, Betsey Trotwood of David Copperfield is a magnificent exception.

"What a piece of work is man..."

Paul, Apostle of Christ, 2018. Directed by Andrew Hyatt.

The fiction of British-Maltese writer Fiorella De Maria depicts women in fierce struggle with the forces which undermine human dignity: yet they illustrate that God is not in the storm. He is in the silence, where we can hear Him, and furthermore, hear ourselves think. Above all, He is the safe harbor from which we are launched into a great, though sometimes painful adventure.