More on: Essays

Q WOULD YOU MIND if I asked you some questions about the current political situation, given the upcoming presidential election and turmoil in Europe? A. I do mind, as a matter of fact. I have nothing to say about such matters. They’re far too complex. Not to mention depressing. And crazy-making. Besides, I left politics behind…

IN past editorial statements, we have pointed out the resurgence of religious ideas and experiences in contemporary art and literature. We have argued that this phenomenon is part of an important cultural shift. Moreover, we have celebrated this movement as a hopeful sign, one of the primary justifications for the existence of Image. But many…

A FEW months ago I received a letter which praised Image for “adding to the stock of available reality.” As I read that phrase, I felt a strange elation—not because it was intended as praise, but because it distilled a great deal of wisdom into very few words. Since the words were set off in…

HAVING grown up in what I would call a rather Waspy milieu in New York’s Upper East Side, my youthful aesthetic sensibility was, to some extent, predetermined. My mother took me to see the classics of art history at the Metropolitan, but she also took me to the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. I was surrounded by…

St. Thomas called art “reason in making.” This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, this is because reason has lost ground among us. As grace and nature have been separated, so imagination and reason have been separated, and this always means an end to art. The artist…

Thomas Merton said that the “oldest thing is the newest thing,” by which he meant that anything alive—including the arts—finds its source in the eternal.  The critic George Steiner has made this argument with eloquence and depth in his recent Real Presences: he specifies the “greatness” of the Great Tradition as God’s immanence. We believe…

WHEN Harold and I brought out the first pilot issue of Image exactly four years ago, we knew that we had undertaken a quixotic task. The “culture wars” were then at their height. The relationship between art and religion was front page news—but only because Senator Jesse Helms and the Rev. Donald Wildmon were trading…