More on: Essays

THE PHERICHE CLINIC clings to a windswept, rocky plateau two day’s hike below Everest Base Camp. Dwarfed by the majestic Himalayan peaks that surround it, this collection of low stone buildings is the highest medical clinic in the world, offering climbers and those who live there the care and expert treatment that are essential in…

RICHARD SERRA’S Torqued Ellipse I and Torqued Ellipse II (1996-97), now permanently installed at Dia:Beacon, remind me of Simone Weil’s axiom that “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by the laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception” [see Plate 1]. These lines, from the opening of her book…

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven! ——————William Wordsworth WITHIN JUST A FEW WEEKS, America recently lost two of its finest sons—William F. Buckley Jr. and E. Victor Milione. One was known to millions, while the other preferred obscurity, but both were seminal figures in the…

I RECALL THE FACE OF A BOY wearing a blue sweatshirt, and I want to tell him that I’ve fallen in love and that I saw a fox midday like a flare, that I saw a black bear in the laurel just this evening and that the roar of life is in me. And I…

A longer version of this essay appears as the introduction to God in the Gallery: A Christian Approach to Modern Art, forthcoming this fall from Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, copyright 2008.    For my wife, Kerri, and children, Daniel, Morgan, and Jacob WE THINK WE KNOW what art is. And that…

The monastic men and women of the fourth century went into the desert for the specific purpose of combating their demons. When I moved to South Dakota with my husband, I had no such design. I wanted a quiet place to write and to nurture our relationship. But by planting myself firmly in a marriage, in my grandparents’ house in a part of the world considered by most to be a desert, I had done something untoward, and more radical than I knew. In a place with few distractions, where it is possible to go to monasteries for excitement, I had taken on the burden of time.

WHEN I WAS TWENTY years old I spent an afternoon with Howard Nemerov. He was the first “famous” poet I had ever met, though I would later learn that he was deeply embittered by what he perceived to be a lack of respect from critics and other poets. (I once heard Thom Gunn call him…

GREG WOLFE,  Image founder, editor, publisher—and as I occasionally like to tease, indefatigable empire builder—has written many provocative essays. One of my favorites is “The Christian Writer in a Fragmented Culture,” which appeared in issue 7 in 1994. In the beginning of the essay, Greg muses on the dilemma of publishing a journal highlighting the intersection of…

Art and the Religious Sense To say that someone is “only human” is to say two things at once. We mean that person is flawed—and that this condition is no more than we should expect. Yet for all our awareness of human frailty and venality, we are haunted by visions of human flourishing, fullness rather…