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Artist of the Month Margaret Gibson ContentsFeaturesArtist of the Month: Margaret GibsonAnnouncing the 2008-9 Milton Center Fellow: Hannah Notess From Stone to Living Word: Letting the Bible Live Again by Debbie Blue Black Robes in Paraguay by William Jaenike Poet Marie Howe Reads at Seattle Pacific University Gallery Watch
Flesh and Passion: The Fervor of St. Sebastian Message Board
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FeaturesArtist of the Month: Margaret Gibson
To spend time in the poetry of Margaret Gibson is to be drawn into an especially vibrant kind of stillness. Gibson’s world is full of a remarkably rich quiet--a quiet you might even call inhabited: not the silence of a pristine meditation chamber, but the quiet of rain falling on a mossy roof, or a walk alone in the woods in winter. The sense of stillness is almost shocking, the way it trembles with anticipation. Through precise, tender, and earthy language, through meditations of the cycles of the natural world and our place in it, her poems move us into the presence of the holy. She shows us again and again how the world is haunted, how full of life and longing nature is, how full of mystery and tragedy, if only we have ears to hear. Her poems open up space for that hearing through their stately, attentive rhythms, and also through the unusual gaps she often leaves between words as punctuation. There is something fearful and majestic to be seen in all of life’s cycles, Gibson shows us, whether it’s a coyote eating the body of a fallen stag, the turning over of a muddy garden in early spring, or the long, slow battle between repair and decay in an ancient cottage. This is the wisdom of someone who has lived attentively and deliberately, a gardener, a spouse, a believer, with a long-held love of a particular place. In her poems we see just how ancient is our world, and just how teeming. Click here for more. Announcing the 2008-9 Milton Center Fellow: Hannah Notess
The Milton Center at Image is pleased to award its 2008-9 postgraduate fellowship in writing to Hannah Notess of Indiana. We had another bumper crop of applications to choose from this year, and are delighted to get our top pick. We’re also excited to welcome our first poet to the Milton Center since it came under Image’s wing four years ago. Hannah Faith Notess attended Westmont College and recently received an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, where she also taught composition and creative writing. Her poems have appeared in The Christian Century, Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, Relief, Ruminate, and Slate, and are forthcoming in 5 AM, Measure, and Mid-American Review. In addition to writing poems and essays, she works as a freelance editor and is editing a collection of personal essays about growing up female and evangelical. She has moved around a lot but now calls Bloomington, Indiana her hometown. We look forward to welcoming her and her husband Jon to Seattle in the fall, where she'll work to complete her first poetry collection. For more information on the Milton Center and its postgraduate fellowship, click here. From Stone to Living Word: Letting the Bible Live Again by Debbie Blue
There is a phenomenon among those of us who inhabit church pews week after week, gazing at projection screens or listening to homilies that package Scripture into a series of neat points and applications. It is the “eye glaze,” the expectation that what is about to be said will not shake and rattle, but confirm and shore up. Debbie Blue, this year’s Glen worship leader and pastor of House of Mercy in St. Paul, Minnesota, gives the pews a firm, friendly shake in her rollicking study of the Bible, From Stone to Living Word: Letting the Bible Live Again. Rather than a map or a path to clarity and stability, she says in the first few opening chapters, the Bible is a witness to the living God that calls us into a relationship with the Other. And relationships are beautiful and messy--especially one that is more like “an intimate sort of tangling with the uncontrollable, even unnamable Yahweh than a neat solution or a removed worship.” From Stone to Living Word is a midrash-like journey through a selection of potent biblical passages that, far from “taming and knotting and noosing,” expands and unfurls the text. In a voice tinged with a delightful colloquial quirkiness, Blue teases out the rich metaphors and “weirdness” of stories like Namaan the leper, who receives healing for no good reason. She inhabits the story of original sin as the choice to elbow our way out of relatedness with God and each other, because we somehow believe that God is the One holding back. And she reveals a Christ who sometimes speaks like a cryptic jester, loves those whom Che Guevera and the Pharisees would agree to despise, and who doesn’t stand back from us, “beckoning fools to get out of their big and loud and stinky vehicles; Jesus is God climbing in the seat beside the fools and remaining there for the duration of the ride.” Ultimately revealed in the Bible, Blue says, is a God who wants to shatter our idols, get us to let go of false security in exchange for grace, and free us to “delight in the fatness and live.” Click here for more. Black Robes in Paraguay by William Jaenike
Those of you who follow Image journal and our presence on the web will probably have noticed the phrase “Christian Humanism” being used from time to time. It refers to a strand of thought in the history of the West that seeks an Incarnational balance between things human and divine. Christian Humanists have traditionally championed the imagination and the importance of embodying theological ideas in the concrete, accessible realms of art and culture. Typically, Christian Humanists are peacemakers, seeking a synthesis between divided or opposing forces--not through mere compromise or lowest-common-denominator thinking but through a deeper imaginative vision that builds upon what is good, true, and beautiful. Historical examples of Christian Humanism would include Augustine’s effort to unite Christianity and Neoplatonism and the Renaissance thinkers who believed that the art and literature of pagan antiquity were important sources of understanding what it means to be human. If you’re interested in this tradition and would like to study one chapter in its history in detail, you might want to read Black Robes in Paraguay by William Jaenike. A good way to prepare for reading this book would be to watch The Mission, a film about the Jesuit missions to the Guarani people of South America in the eighteenth century. (The film is a classic in its own right, with a screenplay by Robert Bolt and starring Jeremy Irons and Robert DeNiro.) In the face of enormous pressure from European colonial slave traders, the Jesuits established a string of mission towns where the Guarani lived in security and produced a remarkable culture. The Jesuits were an order grounded in the Renaissance Christian Humanism exemplified by thinkers like Erasmus. Jaenike’s book goes well beyond the story told in The Mission: he provides fascinating information about the social and political forces behind both the establishment and eventual tragic end of the Jesuit missions to the Guarani. Detailed, but accessible, Black Robes of Paraguay is not merely a romanticized view of this episode in history. Jaenike acknowledges many of the Jesuits’ faults and some of the inherent problems with their paternalistic relationship to the Guarani. Nevertheless, he also shows that in the context of ruthless slave trading and the rise of absolute monarchs in Europe, the Jesuits helped to bring about something beautiful and even humane. Which is what Christian Humanism is all about. To buy the book, click here. Poet Marie Howe Reads at Seattle Pacific University
On May 7 at 7:30 p.m., poet and winner of the National Poetry Series Marie Howe will give the Fan Mayhall Gates Literary Reading in the Student Union at Seattle Pacific University. Sponsored by the Seattle Pacific University Department of English, the Gates Reading is given annually in honor of one of the university’s most beloved professors of English. Says Stanley Kunitz, "Marie Howe's poetry is luminous, intense, and eloquent, rooted in an abundant inner life. Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred." Marie Howe is the author of three volumes of poetry: The Good Thief, What the Living Do, and the forthcoming Kingdom of Ordinary Time. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, Poetry, Agni, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and Partisan Review, among others. She currently teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia, and New York University. This reading is free and open to the public. For more information, call (206) 281-2988. For directions to SPU, click here. For a map of campus, click here. Gallery WatchFlesh and Passion: The Fervor of St. Sebastian
CFM Gallery and Guest Curator Jan K. Kapera of JKK Fine Arts present an exhibition of works by international artists, Flesh and Passion: The Fervor of St. Sebastian. More than twenty artists explore various aspects of Sebastian’s martyrdom, from the physical--his body was pierced with arrows, and he was left for dead--to the mysterious events that took place after he died. The exhibit will run May 9 through June 4, 2008. An artists' reception will be held Thursday, May 8 from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m. RSVP by calling (212) 966-3864 or e-mail cfmg@mindspring.com. CFM Gallery is located at 112 Greene Street, SoHo, New York City 10012. Go to the gallery website or visit JKK Fine Arts for more about the exhibit. Christina Saj: The Six Days of Creation
Christina Saj is a painter with family roots in Ukraine who lives in New Jersey and creates works of art for sacred spaces. Her latest collection, a vibrant series of six paintings inspired by the six days of creation, is on display at the New Brunswick Theological Seminary Chapel in New Jersey. Christina Saj’s contemporary interpretations of icons have been widely exhibited in such venues as the American Bible Society, Union Theological Seminary, the Ukrainian Museum in New York, Museum of Cultural Heritage, Kiev Ukraine, and the American Embassy in Qatar, as well as at the White House. The Six Days of Creation is on display now through May 31, 2008, and an artist’s reception will be held on May 3, 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Click here for more. Matthew Whitney at the Orange Splot Gallery in Seattle
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