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Bent Body, Lamb

By Molly McCully Brown Essay

Really, though, I’m struggling. Is it absurd to adhere to a religion whose most central rituals my body won’t even let me perform? What am I to make of all the parables in the New Testament where Jesus heals the crippled and the lame? And, most importantly, if I believe we’ll all eventually be resurrected back into the world, then is this body—this bruised, broken, wreck of a form—the one I’m stuck with for all time?

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Grief Daybook: Evans’ Gulf of Mexico

By Carol Ann Davis Poetry

There are panels of sky as good as forgotten, Evans’ gelatin folds of Florida circa 1934. The line of sky is dark at first where the gulf hits it, then comes to me like a halo around the palm tree with its neck bent, its spray of branches leaning out of frame as if to…

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Jerusalem Manor

By Ben Birnbaum Essay

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…

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Young-Adult Fiction Comes of Age

By Hannah Faith Notess Book Review

The Possibilities of Sainthood by Donna Freitas (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2008) Dark Sons by Nikki Grimes (Hyperion, 2005) Trouble by Gary Schmidt (Clarion Books, 2008) Once Was Lost by Sara Zarr (Little, Brown, 2009) AS A TEENAGER, I was given several novels in a series of inspirational young-adult (YA) books. On their pastel covers, modestly sweatshirted girls with big hair and…

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Sentence

By Holly Welker Poetry

You lie like a comma in the sentence of your bed. Your legs stack like planks; each hand steadies the opposite shoulder. It’s a position you assume when assailed by dreams or sleepless longing, or on nights you feel you’re breathing broken glass. Tonight you buckle into yourself and mourn two vocabularies, a moldy discourse…

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Symphony in Yellow: A Young Girl Reading

By Lise Goett Poetry

after Fragonard When the first crocuses, the ones called golden crowns and the ones called midnights, push up through February’s mausoleum ground, I think of Fragonard, his patrons dead, the Terror over, the stays of his golden swing now cut. And I am tempted to lie down, even though the ground is cold, and listen…

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The Myth of Independent Film

By Craig Detweiler Essay

IT STARTED with a phone call. “Sweet D, I’m coming to California. I want to interview you for my new book.” Nobody ever called me “Sweet” except my Davidson College roommate, John Marks. Evidently he was on the prowl, in search of his next story. I was intrigued. “Why me?” I asked him. “Because you…

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On Becoming Divine

By Kim Peavey Essay

On Becoming Divine: Within Theological School, and Without I HAVE NEVER BEEN smote on the head, or anywhere else, for that matter, with religious conviction. Yet, after years of milking cows, traveling, graduate study in poetry, teaching college writing, shoveling horse manure, and stints as a researcher and writer, I found myself applying to theological…

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Imperative

By Richard Spilman Poetry

Go then into the spare light of dawn, Into the sparkling rime, from the long dream Of yes and no, stand still as the falcon passes Close behind and then in a rush of feathers Embraces the crooked pole and its power line; Go, believing in some destination, onto the shore Where destination founders, where…

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Faith

By Katharine Coles Poetry

I understand the problem. You make A metaphor to try to heal Something. At its heart is a wound You put there. Write A postcard, send it off—now Believe it will arrive A whole planet away, A lifetime, into another’s hands. Try Not thinking what might go wrong.

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