More on: Interviews

For Image’s inaugural issue, editor Harold Ficket interviewed the Presbyterian minister, novelist, and memoirist Frederick Buechner (1926-2022), covering a range of topics of interest: inspiration for his novels, the ambiguity inherent to experiences of the divine, and the faith-informed vision necessary for seeing miracles. “God moves in these elusive, mysterious, ambiguous ways through our lives,”…

If poetry has nothing else to say, it says this: this world is much more peculiar than you imagine.

Becoming involved in a poem, allowing the lines to unfold, not knowing if there’s going to be a surprise, a turn, or deepening—this is very similar to being with a patient or family as a chaplain when I don’t have all the answers. Part of my job is to sit with them in uncertainty. It’s a big white space.

We’re talking here about two projects: rereading art history to recover a wider context for religious meaning, and rereading it to recover a wider sense of the art historical project. You are aiming at the first, which is the larger and more important one, but our examples have been mainly the second, which would be a tonic to the discipline.

My first sense of the sea was that briny scent, the waves teal and tinged with white froth, and they hurled themselves into this pristine white sand. As far as a child can have a transcendent experience, this was it.

“Literature…can hold up those things that mainstream society doesn’t believe: that Black people are there. One of my jobs is just holding that up to the light so that everyone can see that they’re there.”