Image's Editor to Judge for the National Book Awards
Gregory Wolfe, the editor of Image, has been invited to be a judge in the Nonfiction category of the National Book Awards. "I'm a little bit stunned," Wolfe says, adding that "I'm not sure whether I'm more stunned at having been asked or by the prospect of having to read approximately 400 books this summer." The other judges in the Nonfiction category include Brenda Wineapple, biographer of Nathaniel Hawthorne; Mark Bowden, author of Blackhawk Down; Tony Horwitz, author of Blue Latitudes; and Dennis Covington (featured in Image #27), whose Salvation on Sand Mountain was itself a finalist for the National Book Award. Wolfe just returned from a trip to Washington, DC, where he spoke to the White House Christian Fellowship and the Faith and Law Luncheon on Capitol Hill. His topic on both occasions was the importance of learning from the tradition of Christian Humanism in our ideologically-driven society.

For more on the National Book Awards, click here.

Over The Rhine's Drunkard's Prayer
As a band, Over the Rhine continues to go deep where others would opt for wider reach or anthemic heights. From their early independent releases to their classic Good Dog Bad Dog and on through the grand two-CD release Ohio (2003), Over the Rhine has been true to its mantra-"Quiet music should be played loud." After touring for Ohio, Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler needed to regroup-to reflect not only on where their art was going, but also their marriage. As Detweiler writes on the group's website, "a few months into our national tour, Karin and I realized that although good things were happening with our music, there was just very little energy or creativity or time left over for our marriage, and it was taking a toll on us.... We decided to redirect the same thought and energy that we had been putting into writing and performing toward our life at home together. We prayed a lot. Our friends prayed a lot. It was the beginning of a wonderful new chapter for us." The result of their labors is one of Over the Rhine's best recordings to date: Drunkard's Prayer. The album was recorded in Bergquist and Detweiler's living room and reflects the relaxed atmosphere and sonic warmth that can only be found in home and hearth where one discovers, akin to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, that it was all there all along. A consistent vibe of fragility and desire runs through each track, as if a glass of wine has just been poured and set before two people who long to talk but have lost the words along the way. With upright bass, piano, acoustic guitars, a few horns, a few subtle textures, and Bergquist's sublime voice, Drunkard's Prayer is served as a feast in a single glass of Pinot Noir, something to settle into the twilight with or come home to at the end of a long day-especially when love opens the door.

To buy Drunkard's Prayer, go to http://www.pastemusic.com/product/1088.

Don't forget that Karin and Linford will be spending all week with Image at the Glen Workshop, including playing a full-length concert. For more about this year's Glen, go to http://www.imagejournal.org/glen/05/.

Mary: Images of the Mother of Jesus in Jewish and Christian Perspectives
Jaroslav Pelikan, David Flusser, Justin Lang, O.F.M.
In 1986 leading historians and theologians Jaroslav Pelikan, David Flusser, and Justin Lang first fashioned the triptych of essays that compose Mary: Images of the Mother of Jesus in Jewish and Christian Perspectives, an illustrative look at the life and veneration of the holy virgin. Now, two decades later, Fortress Press has published the first-ever paperback edition of the essential tome. Mary features three distinct portraits of the virgin mother, sketched in with the details and texture of each author's perspective. The Franciscan Lang investigates the love showered upon the Mother of the Church by centuries of Catholics in feasts, festivals, songs, and prayers. Yale historian Pelikan probes the debate surrounding the rise of Marian dogma and doctrine. And the Jewish Flusser fleshes out all the academic analysis with the reminder that we must first see Mary as a person who lived, breathed and struggled and serves as a profound connection to Jewish suffering. Flusser urges: "the Mater Dolorosa is not a theological concept or an overpowering experience of the archetypal but primarily a real person who was inspired by her joy and never defeated by her unspeakable pain." Lucid and challenging as these essays are, they are like so many medieval miniature paintings around the true artistic center of the piece: a pictorial gallery of Marian images. Drawn from German Gothic altar pieces and contemporary photographs, the images narrate the Mary story found in the gospels, apocryphal writings (such as the Protogospel of James and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew), and the 13th century Legenda Aurea of the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine. With representational art and sparse commentary, the gallery takes us from Mary's own virgin birth to her assumption and crowning as Queen of Heaven. A fascinating introduction for those unversed in Mary hagiography, the quality of the forty-eight graphic images will intrigue the most ardent Mariologists as well. Together, the essays and visual narrative of Mary: Images of the Mother of Jesus in Jewish and Christian Perspectives form a complete artistic vision that respects critique of Marian legend and veneration, challenges doctrinal presuppositions, and forces us to look at the nature of our own spiritual devotion.

For more information, click here.

People I Wanted to Be
Gina Ochsner
Gina Ochsner's first short story collection, The Necessary Grace to Fall, won numerous awards, including the Flannery O'Connor Award. Her deft and eerie follow-up collection, People I Wanted to Be, is out this month from Houghton Mifflin's Mariner Books. In the new stories, Ochsner's fruitful obsession with post-Soviet Eastern Europe continues. In "Articles of Faith," a mixed-language couple in the borderlands between Finland and Russia is haunted by the three chocolate-drinking, glass-smashing ghosts of their miscarried children. In "The Fractious South" (which appeared in the New Yorker), three generations of Slavic Jews in a teeming apartment building are frayed by the tensions between distant war, family loyalty, censorship, fishing, thermometers, sex, conception, and western cosmetics. The theme of infertility-literal, physical, psychosomatic, or not-weaves through nearly all the stories, as do a peculiarly Slavic blend of hope and fatalism. Ochsner's lyric skill is everywhere present, as is her ability to conjure the mysterious, the sad, and the pathetically comic-which is to say, the deeply human. In "Signs and Markings" (which appeared in Image issue 31), a street-sweeper lost in a back-eddy of Soviet collapse searches-with the combination of post-traumatic apathy and stubborn, beleaguered hope that characterize so many of Ochsner's people-for signs of life: I've learned that it's best to apply my attention to the ground beneath my feet. Is it true, I sometimes wonder, that God created the entire universe by simply uttering the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet? If I squint my eyes, the streets support such a theory: the split brick and cracking stones assume the figures of kaph, nun, waw, and resh. Then I'll see glimmers of light, shiny flashes at my feet. I'll bend over and find a piece of gold filling gummed around stone, refashioned by the heat and the weight of vehicle tires and human feet. Thinking about tanks and riots, the terrible ways someone's dental work could have ended up stuck in the mortar, I'll feel my stomach turning. Then I'll take a better look and discover it's just gold foil, a wrapper from a piece of candy that someone has dropped.

To read reviews or buy the book, click here.

CIVA Conference
Embracing the Gift: 25 Years of Faith and Vision
For the last twenty-five years Christians in the Visual Arts has celebrated and embraced Christian artists, helping them to cultivate their gifts. This year's CIVA conference, an event that only comes around every two years, promises another hearty boost for CIVA members and admirers. Embracing the Gift: 25 Years of Faith and Vision will take place June 16-18 at Azuza Pacific University in Los Angeles, CA. The theme of the conference draws upon the idea of the "abundance of gifts" granted to artists of faith. Christian artists have long faced a chasm separating art from the church. Now more than ever, as the two begin to reconcile, Christian artists are confronted with new challenges: "Are artists salt and light in the secular culture? Are we an alternate voice of God's revelation in the established Church? Do we live in a tension between the culture and the Church?" These and other questions will be addressed by conference speakers, including Father Richard Vosko, a designer and consultant for worship environments since 1970, and Dr. Daniel Siedell, curator of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Additional plenary sessions will consist of small panels of artists, filmmakers, critics, curators, and theologians. Notable speakers for these sessions include L.A. artist Lynn Aldrich and theologians Scott Young and William Dyrness.

For more information or to sign up for the conference, go to the CIVA website: http://www.civa.org/conferences.php.

Gallery Watch

Light and Space and Dark and Tight - Lynn Aldrich
The Carl Berg Gallery in Los Angeles presents Light and Space and Dark and Tight, the latest artwork of Lynn Aldrich. Appearing for the second time at the gallery, Aldrich will debut five new sculptures expanding her repertoire of new store bought materials-rain gutters, downspouts, and birdcages, along with corrugated plastic panels and sewing threads. "Seven Seas," one of her latest pieces made out of cut pipes and water hoses, appears to ripple off of the wood while alluding to the transcendent. To see "Seven Seas" and Aldrich's other work, visit the Carl Berg Gallery now through May 21, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11-6 p.m.

For more information, click here.

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 email to gwolfe@spu.edu.

(For a complete catalogue of continuing events and announcements supplied by Image Update readers, check out "What's New Elsewhere.")

Upon a Peak in Darien: Call for Submissions
Christian poets in North America, especially on the West Coast, are encouraged to submit one or two poems to be considered for inclusion in a collection of verse by American and Australian Christian poets. The focus for this collection will be the Pacific Ocean, the vast watery divide and brooding presence that stretches between our two continents. The title for the collection will be Upon a Peak in Darien, after Keats' well known sonnet ('On First Looking into Chapman's Homer') and will hopefully provide a means of bringing closer together the Pacific Rim poetic communities of both North America and Australia. If you would like a poem or poems to be considered for this collection please submit entries as a Word Attachment to Dr. Peter Stiles at pstiles@trinity.nsw.edu.au. All entries for this collection must be received by Friday, 24th June, 2005. Contributors should include a short biography of no more than 50 words. This is a non-profit venture and all decisions regarding the choice of poems rest with the Editor.

Faith and Film Festival in Atlanta
Atlanta-based arts and media group Art Within will expand genres in May when it replaces its regular spring theatrical production with film productions for the first time. In an ever-increasing effort to foster spiritual exploration in the media and arts, Art Within will host Atlanta's inaugural Faith and Film Festival on Stage 2 at the 14th Street Playhouse in Midtown, May 13 - 22. The Faith and Film Festival will showcase more than 50 film shorts (films that are less than 30 minutes in length) over two weekends, including 2003 Academy Award-nominated film Most (Best Live Action Short Film category). Each showing of the Faith and Film Festival will consist of different films, with the exception of the featured short, MOST, which will be shown each evening. Single tickets for the Faith and Film Festival are $10 and event passes are $40, and may be purchased at the door. The Festival will run Friday, May 13 & 20 at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, May 14 & 21 at 2 p.m. & 7:30 p.m.; and Sunday, May 15 & 22 at 5 p.m. Art Within will also be sponsoring a 72-Hour Film Challenge, May 12 - May 15. Contact Laura Swickard McGowan at (847) 328-8009 for any questions.

For more information about the Faith and Film Festival, go to www.faithandfilmfestival.com.

For more information about the Film Challenge, go to www.artwithin.org.

Subscribe to Image Online and Catch Up on the Last Image Conference
If you love the kind of art, music, and writing you read about in ImageUpdate but don't yet subscribe to Image in print, we want to extend a special offer to you: subscribe online now, and we'll throw in a free CD or DVD of any available talk from our 2003 conference on narrative--just to thank you for subscribing.

The 2003 Image Conference, "A Narratable World: The Theological Implications of Story," explored the way members of the Abrahamic faiths, as People of the Book, understand the world through stories--in disciplines from theology and poetry to music, fiction, and fishing. Available tapes include talks from nonfiction writer and commercial fisherwoman Leslie Leyland Fields, theologian Stanley Hauerwas, literary critic Roger Lundin, and novelist and essayist Joy Williams, as well as the ecumenical worship service with a homily from poet and essayist Luci Shaw. All are available either on CD or DVD. Read more about the conference.

Click here to order a subscription. When you get to the "Payment/Shipping" screen, in the "Shipping Instructions" field, type 1) the words "Special Offer: Narratable World," 2) the name of the speaker you want, and 3) whether you want a DVD or CD. We'll mail you the disk right away, and your subscription will start in three to six weeks.

This offer is only available with internet orders for new personal subscriptions and expires May 31, 2005.

Kathleen Norris to Headline Fall Image Conference
Mark your calendars! The twelfth annual Image Conference will be held November 10-13, 2005 in Houston, Texas. This year's theme: "The Matter of Devotion: Art, Liturgy, and the Stuff of Worship." Speakers will include Kathleen Norris, author of Dakota and The Cloister Walk; philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, author of Art in Action; Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking; poet Robert Cording; Seven Dance Company; and visual artists Alfonse Borysewicz and Wayne Forte. (More speakers and presenters will be announced in due course.) In his essay "Trumpets, Ashes, and Tears," Wolterstorff describes the "one-plus-six rhythm" that calls believers together to worship on one day each week, then disperses us to do our work in the world for the other six. He describes the complicated tension in our religious heritage that opposes sacred and profane, worship and work. Is worship meant to strengthen us as we return to work, or are our daily pursuits merely a prologue to our devotion? How should the quotidian experiences of joy, suffering, and repentance be given flesh in the language, music, architecture, and visual art that create both the environment for worship and the liturgy that takes place there? The 2005 Image Conference will explore these questions, with particular reference to the ways that art provides the sacramental link between the sacred part of our week and the workaday world of diapers and spreadsheets, shoes and books. A distinguished group of artists and scholars will examine issues including the changing relationship between worship and contemporary culture, both high and low, the ways in which fine art and liturgical art influence one another, and the renewal movements in both traditional and emerging churches.

Stay tuned for more information in the coming weeks and months:
http://www.imagejournal.org/conference/

Announcing Image's Glen Workshop 2005
"This Great Unknowing: Drawing Near to Mystery"
July 31 - August 7, 2005

The Glen Workshop is an illuminating conference on the arts and religion, where participants practice and strengthen their craft and vision in community. This weeklong event combines the best elements of a workshop, an arts festival, and a symposium. By exploring this year's theme, "This Great Unknowing: Drawing Near to Mystery," participants will share a common ground for discussion during the week. Morning workshops are small enough to allow the faculty to give close attention to each participant-to beginners as well as those advanced in their craft. This year's faculty includes illustrator Barry Moser, playwright Arlene Hutton, poets B.H. Fairchild and Andrew Hudgins, mixed-media artist Barry Krammes, Navajo painter Elmer Yazzie, and many others. Afternoons and evenings at the Glen feature faculty readings, lectures, and presentations. Each evening concludes with an ecumenical worship service that incorporates the arts. This year's musicians-in-residence, Karin Bergquist and Linford Detweiler of Over the Rhine, will be giving a concert as well as playing during worship throughout the week. Free time offers participants opportunities for writing, conversation, hiking, and exploring the stunning scenery and cultural treasures in and around Santa Fe. Surrounded by the stark, dramatic beauty of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Glen is hosted at St. John's campus and is within easy reach of the rich cultural, artistic, and spiritual traditions of northern New Mexico. Please note that class sizes are limited: don't wait too long to register!

A brochure will be printed and mailed in early February. If you are on the Image subscriber list, you'll automatically receive a brochure. If you'd like to have one mailed to you, send us an e-mail by clicking here.

In the meantime, to begin your exploration of the Glen Workshop, click here.

And for a personal perspective on the Glen experience, read Roz Dimon's brief reflection here.

Image Forum: Let Your Voice Be Heard!
As a quarterly journal, Image doesn't have a "Letters to the Editor" section that you see in periodicals that appear more frequently. We've always regretted that, because through our pages--and programs like the Glen Workshop and the Image Conference--we've been striving to build community, to stimulate a larger conversation in artistic and religious circles, both in this country and around the world. Now, thanks to some hard work on our webmaster's part, we've launched the Image Forum, a full-featured online message board system. You now have the chance to post and respond to a host of message threads. Write a virtual Letter to the Editor. Start a thread in any of several different forums devoted to particular art forms. Share your work with others. Let us know how to make the Forum better. Let your voice be heard!

http://forum.imagejournal.org

Subscribe (and a whole lot more) Online
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