Montaña de Luz, directed by Matthew Leahy

Issue #171 | June 3, 2009

Features
Artist of the Month: Terri Witek
Forgiveness by Paula Huston
Montaña de Luz
New Tracks, Night Falling by Jeanne Murray Walker
Words and the Word, edited by David G. Firth and Jamie A. Grant

Gallery Watch
Catherine Prescott: The Quick and the Dead

Message Board
Comment Magazine Poetry Competition
Music and Art in the Face of Fear

ImageNews
Image Readings: Barry Moser
The 2009 Florence Seminar
Subscribe to Image in Print

Features

Artist of the Month: Terri Witek

In her poem “Parsonage with Two Maples” (published in Image #60 ), Terri Witek renews Emily Dickinson’s call to “tell it slant.” We sense that it is an autobiographical poem, yet it quickly becomes clear that this is not a work in the confessional mode: there is no “I” calling attention to itself on center stage. Instead, we encounter something like a Hopper painting: a large, open space with distant figures and only the ghosts of narratives past. There is a cat, one or more children, a woman arranging flowers in the church sanctuary, large fields that need to be mowed, and an express train that hurtles onward toward the big city. The poem’s second part demonstrates that this seemingly impersonal approach is anything but indifferent: in it, the speaker offers praise, a form of utterance one might hear in a church or a parsonage. “Praise to the scratch of the past / on the future, praise to the vegetables / someone’s blanching for dinner....” The world Witek depicts forms something like a mold; the space to be filled in is her. As one reviewer on Amazon.com said, apropos of Witek’s latest collection: “The poems in The Shipwreck Dress are mysterious and irresistible, like a beautiful, ghostly figure beckoning, teasing desire while remaining somehow just out of reach.” As we read Witek’s poems, our own ghostly selves step out to meet hers in the open space of the poem. Together, we dance.

Visit our Artist of the Month page on Terri Witek here. To read “Parsonage with Two Maples” from issue 60, click here.

Forgiveness by Paula Huston

Is there a requirement of the Christian life that is more central—or more demanding—than Jesus’s command to forgive those who injure us, and even return good for evil? Is there a notion that flies more directly in the face of our modern sense of individual dignity and self-respect? With honesty, humor, and elegance, in Forgiveness: Following Jesus into Radical Loving, Paula Huston makes the case for the urgent necessity of forgiveness to the Christian life: for individual believers, for communities of faith, and for just societies. A blend of confession, intellectual history, spiritual counsel, and exhortation, this book mixes personal essay with the history of a radical idea. Huston puts the Christian notion of forgiveness in its historical context, beginning by comparing the Mosaic law with the laws of other ancient civilizations, and tracing the notion of human dignity through to the modern notion of “self esteem” (often with a subtle, dry humor). Those who find contemporary writing on Christian life cloying or patronizing will find Huston a welcome relief. In several passages, she writes frankly about her own shortcomings, and her struggles with giving and receiving forgiveness. Refreshingly, she doesn’t make herself the hero with all the right answers—or even put herself on center stage. The book begins with an nuanced but accessible analysis of the problem of evil and includes chapters on the forgiveness of parents and spouses, forgiveness in community, and a profound and moving discussion of the little-discussed problem of accepting the forgiveness of others.

Click here for more information.

Montaña de Luz

Directed by Matthew Leahy in association with the International Filmmakers Institute, Montaña de Luz is a quiet and compassionate documentary that tells the story of a home for HIV/AIDS orphans nestled on a mountain in southern Honduras. The peaceful setting of the mountain orphanage belies the fact that this place has seen a great deal of suffering. In interviews, we see people working at Montaña de Luz who are bewildered by the sheer weight of their empathy. But their tears never cause the film to veer into the gratuitous, because the camera catches small and fleeting moments rather than overbearing or melodramatic ones. We witness the steely reserve in a thirteen-year-old’s eyes when she reveals that the other kids at school won’t shake hands with the “AIDS kids,” and a camera shot of a child’s drawing—not a landscape or a family portrait, but a depiction of a garishly-colored hypodermic needle looming on the page like a neon Empire State Building. In another scene, yards and yards of clothing hang forgotten on the line as the rains roll in. In a different movie this scene might have been charming, but here it is a reminder that normal housework is pre-empted by timed anti-retroviral shots and emergency hospital trips. And yet the abiding picture that emerges as the documentary unfolds is one of hope: the anti-retrovirals are slowly lifting Montaña de Luz off its deathbed. These children run and play and chortle and say simply, “I thank God I am alive.” They even celebrate the forward-looking task of learning chores, and push their wheelbarrows around with huge grins. And they cling to each other, determined to make a family of whatever they have left. “Dilma is love, Dilma embraces the whole world,” they say of the most damaged girl of all, the one who hugs everyone with abandon and coerces the weeping children to talk to her when they will not speak to anyone else. And Dilma is the one who, while looking at a coloring book image of the crucifixion, notices the holes in Christ’s hands—a scene which could represent the film itself: an honest look at suffering that is mingled, nevertheless, with hope.

Click here for more information.

New Tracks, Night Falling by Jeanne Murray Walker

The sense of disconnection and loss in Jeanne Murray Walker’s new collection of poems can barely be touched by words. And Walker admits this right away in her first poem, addressed to a dead neighbor: “You’ve gone AWOL and only Jesus / can bring you back. Not tears, / not rain. Not this poem.” Having thus acknowledged the limitations of her words, Walker nevertheless reaches for a language to grapple with this and other losses. She enlists unusual metaphors to do the job—the dead friend becomes “an ocean who’s abandoned / its bed. The sky who folded up / its blue tent and traveled south.” Because language—however delicate and blundering it can be (as several of Walker’s poems claim)—is also the material with which we construct hope and remember what is good in the world. This is the theme of “Holding Action,” the last poem in the collection, which has been chosen for the Best American Poetry 2009. The narrator of the poem tells her words to “Couple against time, bear / the red geranium, the slender birch — / you, sentences, glitter against // the massive dark of nothing.” One of the ways these poems glitter against that dark is by showing us, with fresh and compelling images, such commonplace beauties as this: “How our houses, breaking free of foliage, / stare candidly at one another’s naked bodies,” or this, in a poem about a man walking in the woods with his dog: “Now sunlight descends around his blue jacket / like harp strings, touching his shoulders , / breaking to arpeggios.” The graceful images in these poems are paired with a clear and colloquial verse, and the subject matter is refreshingly mundane. The poems in this collection contain just as many “sixteen wheelers” and “barf bags” as they do moments of philosophical insight and encounters with death and disaster. Which is simply to say that everything Walker observes in these poems, no matter how ordinary, leads beyond itself like a set of tracks leading into the woods, to a place of mystery and possibility.

Click here to buy the book.

Words and the Word, edited by David G. Firth and Jamie A. Grant

In this age of biblical commentaries, concordances, and endless translations, InterVarsity Press’s new book Words & the Word addresses the increasing role that literary theory is playing in biblical interpretation. Editors David G. Firth and Jamie A. Grant have collected eight informative essays that engage in this conversation. The essays are divided into two parts: general issues concerning literary theory and specific applications of literary interpretation such as speech-act theory, rhetoric, and discourse analysis. In an early chapter, Grant R. Osborne argues that we already apply literary theory in daily acts such as identifying the political stance of a newspaper column, communicating with friends through a shared context and background, and consulting resources such as dictionaries and encyclopedias. As we approach Scripture, we use similar means of analysis and interpretation, whether we are conscious of doing so or not. The authors’ chief concern is not that we simply use literary theory when reading Scripture, but whether we use proper methodology. Later chapters explore the appropriate level of interaction or “trialogue” between author, text, and reader. Jeannine K. Brown, for example, believes an important part of reading the Bible is genre identification: we read the Psalms as poetry and Deuteronomy as law or legal writing, for example. This recognition of genre, Brown argues, can alert readers to formal thematic elements of the text as well as the original authors’ intents and purposes. Written for pastors, teachers, and students of biblical studies, Words & the Word provides an introductory account of how literary theory can be a tool for understanding the Bible. If nothing else, the book reminds us that in order to study the text we so commonly refer to as the Word, we need be mindful of the development and context of the words themselves.

Click here to buy the book.

Gallery Watch

“Death is...vast as a planet at night” – Updike. Cathy Prescott. Oil on canvas.

The YorkArts Gallery in Pennsylvania proudly presents Catherine Prescott and her newest exhibition, The Quick and the Dead: Portraits and Still Lifes. Prescott has been featured as an Image Artist of the Month and has appeared in multiple issues of the journal. She’s also responsible for the lovely portrait of Greg and Suzanne Wolfe that accompanies their web exclusive interview on our website. As with her portraits, Prescott’s still lifes are uncannily real in a way that is beyond the literal. They portray detail exquisitely, but they also capture the essence at the heart of her subjects. The Quick and the Dead: Portraits and Still Lifes runs from June 18 through August 15, and there will be an opening reception on Thursday, June 25 from 6-8 p.m. The YorkArts Gallery is located at 10 N Beaver Street in York, Pennsylvania.

For more information, click here.

Message Board
Post here to reach thousands of readers interested in the intersection of art and faith. We welcome messages about job listings, local events, conferences, prizes, calls for papers, and more. Submit your messages by sending an e-mail here.

Comment Magazine Poetry Competition

Music and Art in the Face of Fear

ImageNews — The Scoop on Our Programs

Image Readings: Barry Moser

World class illustrator Barry Moser is this month’s featured artist on the Image Readings page. In his talk (given at the Glen Workshop in 2008), Moser—who considers himself an outsider to the faith traditions that revere the Bible as sacred—discusses how he went about designing and illustrating the King James Bible. The talk focuses on his attempt to make reverent and respectful images without stooping to the pious and obsequious. Click here to listen.

The 2009 Florence Seminar
What a Thing is Man? The Christian Humanism of Michelangelo  

On September 13-20, 2009, Image will gather a small group of inquirers in Florence and Rome to explore the life and achievements of the sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, Michelangelo Buonarroti. In his works we see the dignity of humanity and its fall, the emergence of the individual and the dangers of individualism, and a fierce struggle to harmonize beauty with goodness and truth. Yet for all the conflict and tension in his work, Michelangelo left us with exquisite images of how God's grace can transform human experience. In Image's twentieth anniversary year, we'll return to Italy to explore how Michelangelo's incarnational vision can inform our own efforts to continue bringing about cultural transformation in our time. Our week together in Italy will begin with a couple days in Rome, where we will visit the Vatican and other sites associated with Michelangelo. The remainder of the week will be spent in Florence, where we will visit the great churches and museums featuring the artist and enjoy exquisite meals at restaurants in the city and the surrounding area. If you're interested, visit the Florence Seminar page or contact Julie Mullins here to request a PDF or hard copy of the brochure.

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