More on: Essays

IN THE MID-1980s, just shy of my fortieth birthday, I found myself out of work and divorced. It was a crash landing of all my aspirations, and crawling from the wreckage of two traumas, I was grieved, confused, desperate—cut off from the world I thought I understood. In the fragile years that followed, I tried…

The following is an expanded version of the introductory remarks delivered at Image’s Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on July 27, 2009. The theme for both the workshop and Image’s twentieth anniversary year, now concluding, was “Fully Human: Art and the Religious Sense.” BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, a bishop of…

MY SON AT TWELVE believes in the Greek gods. Zeus, Athena. Jin favors Poseidon and Ares but likes them all. He can tell intricate stories, like the one about Baucis and Philemon, an old couple who took in Mercury and Jupiter disguised as travelers. A thousand villagers had turned the gods away, and a thousand were…

Neighbors, Strangers,  Family, Friends Four Artists Reflect on Charis The traveling art exhibition Charis—Boundary Crossings: Neighbors Strangers Family Friends features work by seven Asian and seven North American artists. The show grew out of a two-week seminar in Indonesia sponsored by Calvin College’s Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity and the Council for…

Neighbors, Strangers,  Family, Friends Four Artists Reflect on Charis The traveling art exhibition Charis—Boundary Crossings: Neighbors Strangers Family Friends features work by seven Asian and seven North American artists. The show grew out of a two-week seminar in Indonesia sponsored by Calvin College’s Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity and the Council for…

THE ROYAL SOAP OPERA that is the life and reign of Henry VIII evokes endless fascination both in the realms of scholarship and the popular imagination. Erudite tomes heavy with footnotes, racy novels the size of toaster ovens, and sumptuously staged television miniseries pour forth in a steady stream. And what’s not to like? For…

We played the flute for you and you did not dance…. ——————————————–—Matthew 11:17 IN HIS INTRODUCTION to a collection of medieval Welsh tales, the late John Updike describes his reaction: we feel in reading these stories, he says, “as if we are dancing with a partner who hears a distinctly different music.” The Charis exhibit—an…

THE YEAR 1992 marked the release of a film that challenged all conventional notions of filmmaking—and that nevertheless received nearly universal critical acclaim, much to the surprise of its makers. That film was Baraka. Filmed at 152 locations in twenty-four countries on six continents with no narrative or dialogue, Baraka was described as “a guided…

How I would like to believe in tenderness— —Sylvia Plath, “The Moon and the Yew Tree”   HOLY SEPULCHRE Mausoleum and Cemetery sits in a fenced green block on Ridgeland and 111th Street, five minutes south of my apartment. I pass that corner at least once a week, and when I pass it, I pass…

IN THE FIRST DAYS of May, 1610, the renowned Confucian scholar Li Madou lay dying in his home in Beijing. Hundreds of the leading citizens of the Chinese capital came to pay their respects to the man whose books on ethics, mathematics, friendship, and the mysteries of life and death had been read and circulated…