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Henri Nouwen’s Behold the Beauty of the Lord has recently been published in a revised, pocket-sized edition by Ave Maria Press. In four chapters, Nouwen introduces readers to four of the most recognizable icons in the Christian tradition: The Holy Trinity, The Virgin of Vladimir, The Savior of Zvenigorod, and The Descent of the Holy Spirit. The book records Nouwen’s reflections on each of these icons, from his first reactions (often notably unspiritual and attentive to superficial details) to his personal meditations after prayerful and prolonged encounters with the images. In his chapter on Rublev’s The Savior of Zvenigorod, for example, Nouwen begins by saying simply that the first thing he saw was that Christ’s face was “severely damaged,” noting the cracks in the paint and the large portions missing from Christ’s hair and forehead. He segues into a discussion on the unnerving but reassuring realization that through the rubble Christ’s eyes are directed at him, and concludes the chapter with a reflection on the meaning of Christ’s tender and loving gaze, which penetrates the brokenness of humanity. Nouwen’s often profound observations heap meaning upon meaning, reminding us that icons really are something to be read. But that doesn’t mean the writing is overly academic; although these reflections read like mini essays, they remain primarily a prayerful, emotional response to the four icons--an example of how one might enter into a conversation with them, but by no means a prescription. Ultimately for Nouwen, the experience of viewing an icon is summed up in the experience of seeing Christ’s face in Rublev’s Savior icon: it’s an experience of seeing that “leads us to the heart of God as well as to the heart of all that is human. It is a sacred event in which contemplation and compassion are one, and in which we are prepared for an eternal life of seeing.” This twentieth anniversary edition of the book comes with a full-color reproduction of each icon, perforated for easy removal--a practical aid to that seeing process.

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Join Image for an evening with acclaimed Australian writer Tim Winton (Image #2, 10), author of classic novels Cloudstreet and Dirt Music. Twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Winton will read from his eighth and newest novel Breath, which follows two boys living in remote Western Australia and their longing for beauty and escape in the art of surfing. A story about pressing against limits, tempting oblivion, and the possibility of redemption held in the body, Breath, says Colm Tóibín, “is written with Tim Winton’s customary tenderness and vivid sense of place and psychological truth. He manages to portray brilliantly made characters against a mythic landscape, thus creating a narrative that is gripping and breath-taking both in its vast scope and in its use of emotional detail. This is his most forceful and perfect novel to date.” Winton published his first novel when he was twenty-two, and has since published over twenty books. He lives with his wife and three children in Western Australia.

This event is co-presented with Elliott Bay Book Company. Elliot Bay is located at 101 S. Main Street downtown Seattle.

For directions, click here.

Read a full review of the novel here.

Dozens of books have been written about the women in the Bible. What sets apart Virginia Stem Owens’s Daughters of Eve: Seeing Ourselves in Women of the Bible, first published in 1995 and reissued last year, is that it was written by a novelist. If a women-of-the-Bible book doesn’t seem like your cup of tea, this one might surprise you. First of all, Owens’s roster is refreshing: she writes not just about Ruth and Mary Magdalene, Sarah and Esther and Mary and Martha of Bethany, but also about more obscure and less saintly women: David’s clever wife Abigail and his tragic daughter Tamar, Potiphar’s sexually aggressive (and nameless) wife, Queen Jezebel, the mysterious Necromancer of Endor, and, in the New Testament, the woman taken in adultery, the Syro-Phoenician woman who recognized the power of Israel’s Messiah, and the pragmatic Prisca, friend of Paul. As Owens points out, the narrative parts of the Bible don’t talk much about motives or emotions, which leaves plenty of room for imagination. She speculates with vivid and persuasive intuition about the psychology of women about whom we know very little. She imagines, for example, the complicated sibling dynamics among Moses, Aaron, and Miriam; Mary’s sense of loss when her son begins his public ministry; and the psychic isolation of the woman with the chronic hemorrhage, who would have been ritually unclean and therefore cut off from most social contact until she was healed by Jesus. The book is full of surprising and insightful moments of character analysis. Owens arranges the women’s stories into topical categories like marriage, motherhood, and the supernatural--as well as violence, sex, business, and politics. Most of the women she writes about have at least some qualities we can admire (though a few emphatically do not), but Owens’s purpose is not to provide us with a roster of role models and cautionary tales. She does draw lessons from these lives, but only implicitly. Reading with a novelist’s eye, she never rushes to the moral, and in fact seems less interested in distilling principles from these women’s lives than she is in them as people. In her use of psychological language, one might wonder if Owens is retroactively imposing modern concepts onto these ancient stories, but what other way do we have of connecting with them? We can read only through the lens of our own imagination, and because of her sensitivity and care, Owens herself is a kind of reader-role model for our age. Her imaginative readings allow us to identify deeply with women who lived far away, in a time that seems at once much simpler and much more violent than our own. By keeping a narrow focus, this fascinating book allows us to leap over a great cultural divide and place ourselves closer to the world of the Bible than we might otherwise do--and, by analogy, to imagine how God’s hand might be as active in our time as it was in the ancient world. The book also includes a helpful discussion guide for small groups.

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Debra Dean, author of the bestselling novel The Madonnas of Leningrad, has just published an arresting debut collection of short stories, Confessions of a Falling Woman. An actress on the New York stage until converting to the writing life in 1990, Dean has said of her twin professions: “you’re basically pretending your way into the imagined life.” In this collection Dean’s imagination delves into what it means to find grace amidst loss. In “Another Little Piece of My Heart,” a daughter salvages “sentimental junk” from her mother’s Goodwill binge, then finds herself going through her ex-husband’s closet. Wearing his girlfriend’s clothes, she tells herself, “a marriage didn’t dissolve completely, they were still each other’s history, as permanent as ink stains.” In “What the Left Hand is Saying,” the sense of falling for an illusion--in this story, a friendly, asexual puppeteer turned monstrous--leaves the sinking suspicion that we are our own ventriloquists. “The Queen Mother” tells of a turncoat daughter who goes home to participate in a sort of family sting against their inebriated and imperious mother, but the daughter only shows up against her better judgment. Her distressing inability to forgive her mother resonates with the painful inertia of the redemption process, how we make forgiveness so complicated when it can be as simple as a well-placed “I love you.” Dean’s characters are extremely good at deceiving themselves, and yet this versatile, visceral collection also acknowledges the messiness of letting go--whether surrendering missed chances or confessing what has never been said. Letting go, in fact, turns out to be as surprisingly hopeful as the first line of the first story--”Only a mesh of ivy holds this old building upright”--and in the same paradoxical way, this archive of “sentimental junk” quietly proclaims that it is our stubborn hopes that are most real, and most worth keeping.

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Jerome Witkin’s Revelations in Drawing opens with the artist in attendance on Saturday, May 17, 2008, from 6 to 9 p.m. at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts in Los Angeles, California. Witkin was profiled in Image #11, in which Joel Sheesley called his work “an intelligent challenge to a culture which often wants to ignore the intense human dramas which he depicts.” Inspired by artists like Rembrandt and compared to the likes of Lucien Freud, Manet, and Goya, Witkin is fueled by a desire to understand the world through his art. His paintings feature reverence for the form and substance of the human body mixed with a hint of the supernatural. Vincent and Death at right shows a dying Van Gogh watched through an open window by death itself. The gallery is located at 357 North La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles, and the exhibition extends through July 31. For more information, please call 323-938-5222 or e-mail the gallery.

Click here to go to the gallery website.

An exhibit of new paintings by William Schickel is opening May 25 at the William Schickel Gallery in Loveland, Ohio. Schickel’s paintings, stained glass works, architectural designs, liturgical art, and sculptures have been widely commissioned for churches, public spaces, and private collections throughout his lengthy career. An artist’s reception for the exhibit of new paintings, including his Abstract Prayers suite, will be held on Sunday, May 25 from 2 to 4 p.m. at the William Schickel Gallery, 200 W. Loveland Ave., 2nd floor, Loveland, Ohio. Image editor Gregory Wolfe wrote about William Schickel’s work in Image #15. Click here to read an excerpt from Wolfe’s book Sacred Passion: The Art of William Schickel.

If you have information other ImageUpdate readers might find interesting, share it here! Do you have a question that you hope a member of the ImageUpdate community might have the answer to? Ask it here. Have your messages posted by sending an e-mail to gwolfe@spu.edu.

Icon painter Veronica Royal recently launched a website, Royal Icon Studio. Visit the site to view some of her works and to learn more about the Royal Icon Studio’s weekly icon workshop in Annandale, Virginia. Veronica Royal has studied icon writing with Russian, Greek, and American masters, and for ten years has been painting commissioned works for private individuals and public institutions. She currently resides in Virginia with her husband Robert Royal, a writer and Image board member who will be leading Image’s Florence Seminar along with Gregory Wolfe this summer.

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Join the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto June 30-July 11, 2008 for a summer school class, “Art, Beauty & God: Recurrent Themes in Theological Aesthetics,” taught by Dr. Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin and Dr. Wessel Stoker. Since the early church Christian thinkers have been ambivalent about art and beauty. Some reviled them for their supposedly seductive or idolatrous nature, others revered them for their apparent capacity to serve as steppingstones to a higher, spiritual reality. Although since modern times art, beauty, and religion stood in a troubled relationship to each other, both beauty and religion have made dramatic comebacks in recent discussions about art, as have art and beauty in theological debate. Co-taught by a theologian and a philosopher, the course will explore the relationships between: art and beauty; beauty and God; icons and idols; art and worldview; theological and philosophical aesthetics. The course will examine recent developments in theological aesthetics with a view to identifying which theories hold most promise for a holistic contemporary Christian aesthetics.

The registration deadline is June 21, 2008. Register online or by calling Robbin Burry, Registrar, at 416-979-2331 ext 234.

The Milton Center @ 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.

On September 14 -21, 2008, Image will gather a small group of inquirers in Florence, Italy, to explore what has been called “the first Renaissance,” a remarkable moment in the cultural history of the West. Together we will investigate the ways in which three great late-medieval figures—Dante Alighieri, Giotto, and Saint Francis of Assisi—renewed the culture of Europe and left a legacy of Christian Humanism that continues to nourish and inspire. And we will ask how their vision of art and faith can speak to the work of cultural transformation in our time. The seminar includes visits to the great churches and museums of Florence, lectures by some of the world’s leading authorities on the Renaissance, a field trip to Assisi where we will encounter the living spirit of St. Francis, wonderful meals, and time to enjoy each others’ company. If you’re interested, visit the Florence Seminar page, download the Florence Brochure PDF for more info, or contact Julie Mullins here.

If you like reading about great new art and writing inspired by faith in ImageUpdate, and you’re ready to get down to reading and seeing the stuff itself, it’s time to subscribe to Image. Each quarter our editors comb the world of art and letters to bring you our favorite new work—work that respects transcendent mystery as well as the gritty truth of the material world that bears the divine imprint. A one-year subscription gets you four beautifully produced issues delivered right to your door. Ninety percent of the journal’s content is not available on our website, but only through what we call “the sacrament of print.” Click here to get the magazine Terry Tempest Williams calls “evocative and inspiring” and Bret Lott calls “the most meaningful literary journal being produced today.”

Publisher: Gregory Wolfe
Managing Editor: Beth Bevis
Layout: David Rither
Contributors: Beth Bevis, Mary Kenagy, Julie Mullins, Kaitlin Nunn, and Greg Wolfe

ImageUpdate is the biweekly e-mail newsletter from Image, a quarterly print journal that explores the relationship between Judeo-Christian faith and art through contemporary fiction, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, music, and dance. Each issue also features interviews, memoirs, essays, and reviews.

ImageUpdate brings you news about books, CDs, organizations, websites, conferences, exhibitions, and tours—all of which inhabit the intersection between faith and imagination. ImageUpdate will also notify you whenever a new issue of Image is printed, an Image event is upcoming, or new content is posted to our website.

Copyright © 2008 Center for Religious Humanism. All rights reserved.