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The Taste of Eden

By Valerie Wohlfeld Poetry

Do you know the taste of Eden?— the history of the world is on your lips: apples and sin! Fingertip to fingertip God electrifies the elite elect: Adam on the Sistine Chapel, while the devil is on the lam. Who sold Adam to the worm?—script of dust to dust in death’s kinship— God took up…

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Mixed Company

By Brett Foster Poetry

Mark 2 Meaning, not the fey name of a coffee shop cheekily named, but me and the sinners (not “mixed” as in unlike things commingling, but rather the “meh” of our behaviors or consistent confusions, contradictions like breaking news ongoing, over and over with little new to report…) as I was saying, me and sinners…

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Theodicy after City of God

By Joshua Robbins Poetry

If righteousness remains, it is moonlight glinting on the mica-flecked steps and waxed lips of barren concrete planters as midnight skaters’ kickflips grind oblivion near the courthouse sign’s annunciation where stragglers huddle in a delinquent arc against the wind’s cold dispensation of Guilty  and Not in which any joke like How do you  make God…

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The Yoke of Sympathy

By Mary Kenagy Essay

The Yoke of Sympathy: The Fiction Writer and Her Characters   Although the general tone of your [story] “Kirilka” is well maintained, it is spoiled by the character of the land captain. Keep away from depicting land captains. Nothing is easier than to describe unsympathetic officialdom, and although there are readers who will lap it…

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Adam Praises Eve

By Richard Jones Poetry

She is so beautiful, it is enough— her skin like milk, nipples like cherries, her hair a long night without stars. I find irresistible the blue vein pulsing above her left ankle, the green of those intelligent eyes. Everything she wants, I want, and though my mind is cleaved, my full heart can only rejoice.…

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Psyche, Soul, and Muse

By Kathleen Norris Essay

The monastic men and women of the fourth century went into the desert for the specific purpose of combating their demons. When I moved to South Dakota with my husband, I had no such design. I wanted a quiet place to write and to nurture our relationship. But by planting myself firmly in a marriage, in my grandparents’ house in a part of the world considered by most to be a desert, I had done something untoward, and more radical than I knew. In a place with few distractions, where it is possible to go to monasteries for excitement, I had taken on the burden of time.

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Apologia

By Jill Alexander Essbaum Poetry

However innocent your life may have been, no Christian ought to venture to die in any other state than that of the penitent. —————————————————–—Saint Augustine I have been sodden with wine. I have been confused by wine. I have been lied to by men, And yet, I lie down upon such men, Still and willing…

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Born, Again and Again

By Pattiann Rogers Essay

I GREW UP NEAR A SMALL RIVER in southwest Missouri, really a large creek, an easily navigable waterway with a calm current, deep in places, in others flowing with low white ruffles over rocky shoals. I went to this river often, as if to a favorite relative, to see what was happening, wading and swimming…

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Prodigal Ghazal

By Jill Peláez Baumgaertner Poetry

Weightless as a float into the drift of water, one whose sin is forgiven. The Far Country a memory of fists and sour apples. Of that old, heavy plunge through snowfall, frozen, refrozen. The tug of gravity, slow and silent. Of no words forming on dry lips, of breath aching to a full inhale and…

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Thirty Seconds Away

By Gregory Wolfe Essay

The following is an expanded version of the introductory remarks delivered at Image’s Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on July 27, 2009. The theme for both the workshop and Image’s twentieth anniversary year, now concluding, was “Fully Human: Art and the Religious Sense.” BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, a bishop of…

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