• Read this in HTML format
• Subscribe to ImageUpdate for free

We're back from the Glen Workshop, and still catching our breath. This year St. John's was packed to capacity as usual with returning participants and loads of newcomers, including new faculty who slipped seamlessly into the convergence of artists. Students of all levels honed their craft through intense workshops and lectures, challenged by the high standards of the Glen's warm, vibrant community. Rev. Debbie Blue led evening services with a candor and compassion all her own, accompanied by the moody, cerebral "grad school rock" of musician Robert Deeble. The Glen theme this year, "The Artist and the City," came to a peak on Saturday with the rousing address of South Bronx art teacher Tim Rollins, who told us the story of the Kids of Survival (KOS). His inner-city high school students stick around in the art studio after hours, creating works of art inspired by classic literature that garner critical recognition and are sold all over the world. 2008 brought the return of some beloved Glen traditions: artists-in-residence and songwriting workshop faculty Over the Rhine graced us with a concert for the benefit of Image, and the MFA program saw another cohort graduate. We also saw the advent of what may become a new tradition--sacred art cards created and donated by Glen attendees, a beautiful addition to the silent auction. July 26, 2009 will be here before we know it!

To find out more about the Glen Workshop, click here.

To learn more about this book click here.

Third Temple by Richard Chess

The great gift of Richard Chess's poetry is that it reminds us of the earthiness of language--its sounds and shapes, the way it bears the marks of history and geography. His work conveys a palpable sense of the landscape of Israel and Palestine and its beauties and horrors, both ancient and modern. Chess's latest collection, Third Temple, explores the postmodern diaspora that threatens to pull the speakers in these poems free from the past, and those physical and spiritual origins. But they are tenacious, listening hard to their own histories of loss to find a hard-won, and often playful, rootedness in tradition. The utopian vision of raising the temple a third time gets a tweak on the nose by the suggestion of a modern blood sacrifice: not a sheep or dove, but Leon, the speakers' "unblemished chocolate lab." A joke, but also a deadly serious yearning to offer one's best and holiest to God: "I will shake with shame because Leon is all I have / ... but the Lord / deserves more than his extended paw." Also tangible in these poems is the sense that we are, thankfully, never free of what has come before us. Out of the wreckage of the Holocaust, an archivist takes up the "pain- / staking process" of repairing a scroll of Scripture that has somehow survived, a spark from the past that "ignite[s] the paper / Torah of her heart." Language is the anchor for these poems throughout. In Chess's cosmology, language is more than a system of symbols. It is sacred, supernatural, formidable. Chess engages the ancient Hebraic tradition in which the true name of God cannot be spoken or written, and in his work we recover that sense of reverence, a fear and trembling before the power a word can wield. A woman scribe is brought up short attempting to write the Name, "caught on the barb / of infinity." Says the teacher of Hebrew, "That explosion you hear from afar? / It's my heart that has been in exile too long. / ... My job? / To give you lessons in strength and grief." Words hold the weight of the past and of identity. To us modern types, for whom words are often ephemeral or pixilated, this is a bracing truth to bump up against.

The Laughter of the Oppressed by Jacqueline Bussie

Although we typically feature works of creative writing more than books on theology and literary theory, this book caught our attention as one that engages theology through the lens of language and literature. The Laughter of the Oppressed: Ethical and Theological Resistance in Wiesel, Morrison, and Endo examines the theological significance of laughter in three novels where its presence seems most unlikely: Elie Weisel's The Gates of the Forest, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Shusako Endo's Silence. Author Jacqueline Bussie takes a deep, close look at each of these texts and asks what the function of laughter is when it comes from below--from those who suffer. The book begins with an overview of the philosophy of laughter, from Plato and Aristotle, who saw laughter as an oppressive tool used by "superior" people to ridicule and scorn those of lower standing, to Kant and Schopenhauer, who saw laughter as a response to the absurdities and incongruities in the world, to Mikhail Bakhtin, who believed that laughter temporarily empowers the disempowered, allowing them to claim their dignity and upset the ruling elite. Bussie's book takes Bakhtin's theory to another level, arguing that laughter in these three novels is a more permanent act of resistance, an ethical and theological form of resistance. In Wiesel's Gates of the Forest, for example, laughter is one way of responding to the "crisis of representation" caused by the Holocaust. After such suffering and loss, how can we construct a narrative? How can we make art at all? Laughter in Wiesel's fiction acknowledges the limits of language in the face of horror, but it still functions as part of a narrative and is, in some small way, a response to that horror. Laughter in literature can also be a way of responding to paradox. Shusako Endo's persecuted Japanese Christians simultaneously possess faith and renounce it in the face of persecution--an incongruity that causes the missionary priest, Father Rodrigues, to laugh inexplicably. And then there's the laughter of the "believing apostates" themselves, a laughter that is somehow at the heart of the relationship between faith and doubt. Finally, in her study of Morrison's Beloved, Bussie looks at the laughter of slaves as a possible form of emancipation. The spiritual leader Baby Suggs encourages her community to laugh and dance in the midst of their suffering. As in Wiesel, words cannot do justice to the tragedy of slavery. But laughter has a power that words alone do not. It exposes oppressive, racist myths as "externally imposed, entirely ungenuine, and therefore absurdly laughable." At times Bussie's prose gets a little bogged down by theory--at one point, laughter is described as "counterhegemonic," and there are some heavily theory-laden sentences. But the book nonetheless stands out as an important study in the genre of religion and literature, examining a theological issue thoughtfully, and within the incarnated lives of suffering characters in enduring works of fiction.

Good Letters: The Image Blog at Six Months

Image's daily blog, Good Letters, passed its six-month anniversary last month. Just in case you haven't stopped by in a while, we wanted to remind you to pay it a visit (it's on our home page). The dozen talented writers we recruited have exceeded our best hopes for the project, producing an eclectic stream of energetic, profound, tightly-written 700-word pieces on topics from film review to politics, liturgy to television, memoir to philosophy, rock and roll to the nature of art. Perhaps the best way to represent the chorus of voices that makes up Good Letters is to play you a few clips: "Admittedly, in my weaker moments I can be as much a 'tragiholic' as the next person, and am well aware how easily I gravitate toward the kind of graphic images that Sontag contends with for their anesthetizing effect." // "You know the drill from Plato: Poetry and music set the basis of order in society; change the music to something disorderly and 'passionate,' and society goes downhill. It was a compelling argument, and made me feel instantly guilty for driving around in the car listening to Soundgarden." // "For several years, my secret vice has been the Domestic Blogosphere. Posy Gets Cozy is one of thousands of blogs that celebrate childrearing, house decoration, yarn, pets and, often, historical fiction of the English cottage variety." // "I was just finishing graduate school when the feminist movement began--around 1970. It spoke so powerfully to my personal experience that I wrote part of my dissertation on how the movement was transforming women's language: allowing them to discover their own voice for the first time in Western history." // "The upside to living in a prosperous, liberal democracy is that you may choose your own identity; the downside is that when you have so many choices, you can become crippled. Existence precedes essence, sure--but there are so many essences for sale, and I can afford most of them, so maybe I'll take a few years off after college to decide..." // "Poor Jeremy Northam: he's a fine actor but the script forces him to portray Thomas More as at best something of a prig, and at worst a bloodthirsty hunter of heretics." Thanks to all our fine bloggers for contributing their talent and hard work: Michael Capps, Ann Conway, Kelly Foster, Laura Bramon Good, A.G. Harmon, Caroline Langston, Santiago Ramos, Peggy Rosenthal, Brian Volck, Brad Winters, and Greg Wolfe. Add them to your Google Reader (or just come visit us at ImageJournal.org) for a few minutes of thought-provoking, funny, brash, lyric writing each day.

Gallery Watch

Beatitudes at White Stone Gallery

New Zealand oil painter Cornelis Monsma explores the Beatitudes in a series of paintings for a new exhibit at Philadelphia's White Stone Gallery. The exhibit will also include abstract stained glass pieces from North Carolina's Vanessa Wright Hollifield. The Beatitudes, which Monsma and Hollifield have translated into colorful contemporary images, will make their debut at White Stone Gallery, located in the Manayunk section of Philadelphia. The exhibit opens August 15, with a reception from 7-9 p.m., and runs through September 28, 2008.

Message Board

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.

The Other Journal Call for Submissions

The Other Journal (TOJ) publishes creative writing, visual art, and scholarly essays that encounter life through the lens of theology and culture. Issue #13 of TOJ focuses on the US presidential election. We are especially interested in work that addresses change--what are the characteristics of flesh-and-blood, real-life change? How is change challenged, embraced, or defined by our faith or by the church? We welcome poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Fiction submissions may include short stories or self-contained novel excerpts, and creative nonfiction submissions may include personal essays or memoirs. We also welcome films, paintings, prints, photography, music, and academic essays. Please send submissions to submissions@theotherjournal.com by September 1, 2008. For more information about our submission guidelines, click here.

ImageNews -- The Scoop on Our Programs

Image Readings: Jeanine Hathaway

Jeanine Hathaway is a poet who knows how to dance along the edge of the precipice. As a former Dominican nun, a mother, and a teacher, she understands that the stakes in life are high, that love is haunted by fear, faith dogged by doubt, and professional life complicated by ego. And yet her skeptical eye remains wedded to a lyrical sense of the ways in which the good can be experienced...and celebrated. Take a turn or two with her.

Subscribe to Image in Print and Get More Art, Fiction, Poetry, Essays, Interviews, and Every Good Thing

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."

ImageUpdate