Christians in the Age of Sincerity
By Essay Issue 80
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…
Read MoreWritten in the Book
By Essay Issue 80
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…
Read MoreCloud of Unknowing: Twenty-Five Years of Image
By Essay Issue 80
…when you first begin to undertake [contemplation], all that you find is a darkness, a sort of cloud of unknowing…. This darkness and cloud is always between you and your God, no matter what you do, and it prevents you from seeing him clearly by the light of understanding in your reason and from experiencing…
Read MoreWeb Exclusive: A Conversation with Dan Wakefield
By Interview Issue 82
Dan Wakefield recently edited a book of the letters of Kurt Vonnegut, with whom he maintained a literary friendship over four decades. Though Vonnegut is often associated with the skepticism and iconoclasm of the sixties and seventies, faith held a mystique for him. At times he called himself a “Christ-loving atheist” and “a Christ-worshipping agnostic.”…
Read MorePlates from a Forgotten Book: The Paintings of Kim Alexander
By Essay Issue 81
IT IS A RARE mild September afternoon in Dallas when Kim Alexander sits me down. We are at her kitchen table, mere yards from her studio, which has spilled out of one spare bedroom into that familiar mid-mod home space, the den. In the regional vernacular for which we Texans are known but which we…
Read MoreThe We of Me: Varieties of Kinship in American Nonfiction
By Book Review Issue 81
Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography by Richard Rodriguez (Viking, 2013) White Girls by Hilton Als (McSweeney’s, 2013) Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward (Bloomsbury, 2013) THE DUSK OF A SUMMER EVENING in London’s Hyde Park, years ago. Richard Rodriguez, a Mexican-American, is misidentified by a woman he’s passing on the street. She smiles. “Arabie?” The author…
Read MoreMaking It New
By Essay Issue 81
There is nothing new under the sun. —Ecclesiastes 1:9 Behold, I make all things new. —Revelation 21:5 TO CELEBRATE OUR twenty-fifth anniversary this year we chose the theme “Making It New.” It seemed a simple enough decision. This journal exists to publish art and literature that engage the western faith traditions in…
Read MoreMan Is But an Ass
By Essay Issue 84
WHEN I WAS YOUNGER, I had two dreams. One of those dreams was to be a preacher. I wanted to preach because I loved public speaking, and because I loved memorization, and also because I grew up in the Church of Christ, which taught that baptism was the only way to get into heaven, but…
Read MoreThe Reclusive Novel: Community, Tradition, and Loneliness
By Book Review Issue 83
Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers (Knopf, 2014) High as the Horses’ Bridles by Scott Cheshire (Henry Holt and Co, 2014) THE WORLD HAS TURNED SMALL in our hands.…
Read MoreEx Nihilo, Then Us
By Poetry Issue 83
From nothing God made everything, they said. Nothing plus God is nothing we said. But with something to work with, look what we’ve done. God said, you’d better and you’d better not, they said. And sometimes it looks like you have when you shouldn’t. Eyewash, we said, it’s just how we are, honeyed self-interest in…
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