More on: art and faith

SOME YEARS AGO Charlottesville, Virginia, was abuzz with the news that a wealthy Roman Catholic couple on an estate near town had built a private chapel for worship and had commissioned a painting of themselves in the presence of a resurrected Jesus Christ. My wife was amazed; what effrontery! I defended the couple, pointing out…

Figure and Landscape in the Work of Enrique Martínez Celaya   “Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth….” Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. —Genesis…

I HAVE TRIED  to learn the language of Christianity but often feel that I have made no progress at all. I don’t mean that Christianity doesn’t seem to “work” for me, as if its veracity were measured by its specific utility in my own life. I understand that my understanding must be forged and reformed within…

Migrant Farm Workers, a Medieval Mystery Play, and the Future of Religious Art in America   ON A CLEAR, COLD DECEMBER evening a few weeks before last Christmas I sat in a 215-year-old adobe church and listened to the devil preach the gospel. The devil, or Luzbel as he was named in the play I…

Image: In your essay in the new issue of Image, “Power in the Blood: Hollywood and the Myth of Religious Violence,” you write about the strange relationship Hollywood has to Christianity—mainstream Hollywood movies tend to use violent Christians, often broadly stereotypical ones, as villains. They also tend to tell stories where further violence is used to…

Sadao Watanabe (1913–96) was a printmaker celebrated internationally for his depictions of biblical subjects using traditional Japanese techniques. A longer version of this essay will appear in Beauty Given by Grace: The Biblical Prints of Sadao Watanabe, published by Square Halo Books in conjunction with a traveling exhibit sponsored by Christians in the Visual Arts.…

The following is adapted from an address given at the Wild Goose Festival in Corvallis, Oregon, on September 1, 2012. BEFORE I CAME DOWN here to deliver this talk on how art and social justice should—and shouldn’t—mix, I posted on Facebook that I was preparing by reading the works of various writers. One commenter singled…

Robert Clark was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He received a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in medieval studies from the University of London. He is the author of ten books, both fiction and nonfiction. Clark’s first collection of personal essays, My Grandfather’s House, was a finalist for…

The following is adapted from a commencement address given for the Seattle Pacific University master of fine arts in creative writing on August 3, 2013. OUR THEME FOR THIS residency has been comedy. As we’ve discovered, it’s a difficult topic precisely because we think we know all about it already. A number of truisms trip…

Julia Spicher Kasdorf is the author of three poetry collections—Sleeping Preacher (1992), Eve’s Striptease (1998), and Poetry in America (2011)—all from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Sleeping Preacher won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes College’s Association Award for New Writing, and Eve’s Striptease was named one of the top twenty poetry books of 1998 by Library Journal. She has…