My parents were supposed to spend the last week at the United Methodist Church General Conference in St. Louis. Dad, who’s served as a UMC minister for the past forty-two years, joked that he wanted to be there to see the church either go down in flames or rebuild itself from the ashes, depending on…

What I would like to give them for a change is not the usual prescription with its hubris of the power to restore, to cure… So begins one of my favorite of Rafael Campo’s poems, “What I Would Give,” from his 2002 collection Landscape with Human Figure. Right from the start, the poem enacts Campo’s…

I was sitting on the bed in my grandma’s studio apartment. My mother and grandmother were on the fancy electronic couch with the motorized recliners and USB ports. We were a little cramped and rather warm because Grandma kept the temperature near 80 degrees. Grandma was crying again.“I keep thinking he’s going to walk through…

The Alexamenos Graffito In “Christ the Chimera: The Riddle of the Monster Jesus” (Image 99), art historian Katie Kresser traces the tradition of the monstrous in Christian iconography to AD 200 and the Alexamenos Graffito, which depicts Jesus as a donkey-headed figure on a cross.The Jesus of art history has been associated with the god…

“I’m going to shoot them,” my husband announces.  “I just got pooped on.” I felt bad for Michael, as he pulled off his shirt, freshly smeared with the stinky mess of vultures, but I wasn’t going to take his side on this. I stood with the vultures.  “You can’t kill them,” I said. “It’s probably…

Through a Glass Darkly Alien-insect hybrid saints, haloed in Blakean light, set within a frieze of golds and incandescent blues; of antennae and hands. It sits, this stained-glass greenhouse–perhaps six feet tall and ten at its length; no bigger than the grave of a full-grown man–below 23 stories of Brutalist tower near Hyde Park in…

Melekh matzmiach y’shuah; “sovereign who causes redemption to flourish.” As I have countless times, I prayed those words on Shabbat morning. They come in the opening passages of the Amidah, the standing Jewish Prayer of Prayers. This particular Shabbat followed shortly after a visit to UNC Asheville by Tamika Mallory, co-president of the Women’s March.…

Living in brownstone South Brooklyn, we walk everywhere. There is always something to look at. This is an Italian Catholic neighborhood; a casual atmosphere of bathtub Marys and various saints lounge in the front yards. Some are well-attended, brightly white, watching over manicured lawns. Others crumble in silence, their owners old mainstays in a swiftly…

Samuel Martin’s powerful review-essay in the current issue of Image (#99), “Piercing the Fog of God,” pulls me into areas of my Christian faith where I’d rather not go. Drawing on the short stories in three debut collections by contemporary writers, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Chanelle Benz, and Melissa Kuipers, Martin explores what Christian sacrifice, damnation,…

A decade ago, my wife and I took the Amtrak from D.C. to New York to celebrate our first wedding anniversary with a visit to MoMA. It had been a hard year. The economy had crashed. The magazine we worked for had folded and with it the future we’d imagined for ourselves. Unable to make…