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Through reviews and longer articles, ArteFact keeps a finger on the pulse of how our culture is reflecting on itself.
Film Fiction Theatre Music PoetryThe bucket in the laundry room
is stored up on the highest shelf
and labeled, in black marker, MOM—
with six kids lugging water out
to chickens, goats, and grazing sheep,
our buckets tend to disappear.
Tonight, my husband fills it up
with water, lukewarm like the baths
we used to draw for curling newborns
in our apartment’s kitchen sink...
A blessed Christmas and wonderful new year to all of our readers! We hope you enjoy this literary gift to you: a poem from Caitlin Smith Gilson's forthcoming collection, Luminous Darkness: The Passion of the Last Words (Wipf & Stock, 2025).
Long ago I was young
I did not know it then
But it was for you
To be this dying comet of love
Finishing my soul in you...
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...
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.
November 16, 2022 marked the passing of David L. Schindler, Dean Emeritus and Edouard Cardinal Gagnon Professor Emeritus of Fundamental Theology at the John Paul II Institute in Washington, D.C. Dr. Schindler played a fundamental role in establishing Humanum: Issues in Family, Culture & Science in 2011 and continued to be a great friend of the publication in the years that followed.
Reading Czesław Miłosz’s poetry can feel a bit surreal these days. Frequent visual echoes of his poems flash by on screens, images of cities turned to rubble, armored vehicles patrolling through wreckage, and refugees fleeing across eastern Europe. Miłosz’s poetry is partly a poetry of witness, work influenced by his first-hand confrontation of Nazi and Communist aggression during and after the Second World War.