Mystery
By Essay Issue 75
The Word-Soaked World Troubling the Lexicon of Art and Faith Since 1989, Image has hosted a conversation at the nexus of art and faith among writers and artists in all forms. As the conversation has evolved, certain words have cropped up again and again: Beauty. Mystery. Presence. For this issue, we invited a handful of…
Read MoreThe Three Kings
By Short Story Issue 75
Balthazar KING Balthazar loved the freshness of his gardens and smiled to see the reflection of his ebony face in the clear water of the tanks. And he loved the joyfulness, the commotion, and the abundance of banquets, and often his parties lasted till daybreak. However, late one night, after all the guests had withdrawn,…
Read MoreA True Story
By Poetry Issue 78
An old man was dying in the hospital, —-my friend the doctor told me. He was eighty-nine, his whole life a tailor in a shop —-below the room where he was born. He had no one, so a kind aide from Ghana —-sat with him, one hand in his the other holding her sandwich. The…
Read MoreAn Apprenticeship in Affliction
By Essay Issue 77
An Apprenticeship in Affliction: Waiting with Simone Weil I DOUBT there is a twentieth-century figure who has inspired more poetry than the French philosopher-mystic Simone Weil. Though her writings were few and fragmentary, their utterly unconventional, severely brilliant insights and her absolute fidelity in living out her own precepts have moved poets to produce…
Read MoreRadiant Energy
By Poetry Issue 79
Little cherub, do you not fly? Or have you landed here in clothing of light To fool the eye? If I hear you in my heart Are you not alive? What I cannot touch I feel I cannot know And yet I know you are in my knowing If knowing is a body, does it…
Read MoreThe Neighbor
By Short Story Issue 79
JACOB FELT TERRIBLE: he had slept through the whole thing. The ambulance, the EMTs. It had happened at seven in the morning, and his alarm had been set for eight. Was it better or worse that no one else in the hall heard anything either? Mrs. Wilkinson had been taken away, and she had not…
Read MoreNotes toward Knowing
By Essay Issue 85
Reading from Two Books: Nature, Scripture, and Evolution In the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians described nature as a book, a coherent work in which we could glimpse the mind of God. Like scripture, the book of nature bore the divine imprint—the Imago Dei—and the two books were seen as complementary. In the centuries…
Read MoreIdeal Marriage
By Short Story Issue 81
THROUGH A WARMING NIGHT the ice dams on the Big Slough thawed, and in the morning the first robins, antic in their hunt for worms, hopped in the south yard. Freddie Cahill’s spirit, dormant through what had seemed the longest winter of the eighty-some she’d spent on earth, stirred once again to meet the season’s…
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