More on: church

The sexton lives in a big stone house. After supper he unlocks his church for a fee. Our tour group pays to climb past organ and choirloft, into the belfry where the daring grip a sheep-skinned knot and pull the rope straight down into a scene from the novitiate when I was in love with…

JONQUIL EVANS TURNED off of the blacktop and drove toward the pines in the distance. Gravel sounded against her LeSabre. She drove gingerly, but on this afternoon in late November the makings of a holiday wreath meant more to her than her LeSabre’s fine finish. Her husband the judge was good to her. Sometimes it almost…

I’M DOING A CLEANSE,” Odin says. “Me and Mara. Just broth all day.” We’re standing at the corner of Grant and Polk by city hall in San Francisco, waiting for our ride to the Headlands where we will meet DT and do the vernal equinox ritual—“I know of a sacred tree,” he’d said, “at Rodeo…

They say statues wept when she passed—gypsy girl in the choir who spoke in tongues. I thought she was faking, but prayed, just in case, that I would never babble, or, during the peace, slump over and writhe. I hid behind my knotted hair to plot her exposé. Her and her clan of women, smoke…

The Word-Soaked World Troubling the Lexicon of Art and Faith Since 1989, Image has hosted a conversation at the nexus of art and faith among writers and artists in all forms. As the conversation has evolved, certain words have cropped up again and again: Beauty. Mystery. Presence. For this issue, we invited a handful of…

Whether we have slept through Matins’ dream offices or lain awake, we rise to a morning bell we do not call Lauds, and not calling it ablution, we, for the day’s offices, flush dust and dead skin from our many creases. On the highway and through the parking garage to a computer pinging with the…

The Road Ahead Voices for the Next Twenty-Five Years Many gifted artists and writers of faith working today were just learning how to read and hold their crayons when Image was founded. They never experienced the culture wars of the eighties that weighed so heavily on an older generation; theirs are a different set of…

CAR HEADLIGHTS from the Miami traffic outside brushed along the upper chapel walls, grazing the stained-glass windows and the cross suspended there. Ever since Esteban and I had entered the Lutheran church on Fifty-Seventh, we’d been silent. I shifted in the pew. Although Esteban had been carting me to youth group all of freshman year, this…

A chain of blue-white chips mimics waves pleating around Christ’s body. On the western wall, another scene of owl-eyed saints drawing light unlike us. Despite centuries of votive smoke, the shining ranks of prophets gesture, elegant as sommeliers, toward mosaic scrolls and would have you consider the honeycombed geometry of paradise—dome, arch, and column— it’s…