More on: editorial statement

The following is adapted from the preface to The Operation of Grace: Further Essays on Art, Faith, and Mystery. My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest? but thou art…

The following is adapted from a commencement address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative writing graduation in Santa Fe on August 8, 2015. The great poet does not completely fill out the space of his theme with his words. He leaves a space clear, into which another and higher poet can speak.…

The recent controversy over Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture—which touched on the nature of human reason, but which also questioned, in passing, the relationship between faith and reason in Islam—may turn out to be more productive than was at first thought. Among other things, it generated a substantive open letter to the pope signed by…

The following is adapted from the commencement address given to the first graduating class of the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing. The ceremony was held on August 4, 2007, as part of the MFA residency that is held concurrently with Image’s Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  …

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven! ——————William Wordsworth WITHIN JUST A FEW WEEKS, America recently lost two of its finest sons—William F. Buckley Jr. and E. Victor Milione. One was known to millions, while the other preferred obscurity, but both were seminal figures in the…

LAST NIGHT I watched—mesmerized, despite its near three-hour length—Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, a minimalist science fiction epic set in a dreary, bombed-out industrial wasteland. The title does not derive from the contemporary connotation of sexual predator, but goes back to the sort of guide who leads hunters to where game can be found. In fact,…

The following remarks were given at Villa Agape in Florence, Italy, on the opening evening of Image’s Florence Seminar, September 14, 2008.   IMAGE is a journal devoted exclusively to contemporary literature and art—to the present moment—but here we are in the cradle of the Renaissance. We have not come out of mere antiquarian curiosity,…

WHEN I first arrived at Oxford University in the early 1980s to pursue graduate work, I was all swagger on the outside, but that was to conceal the soft center of terror within. I had gone from being a big man on a small Midwestern campus situated between two cornfields to a nobody at an…

ARE YOU CONVINCED that everything is going to hell in a handbasket? Down the tubes? Or are you possessed of a more sanguinetemperament? Do you feel that life is getting better every day in every way? Do you believe in progress or regress? What would the make and model of your handbasket happen to be?…

The following is an expanded version of the introductory remarks delivered at Image’s Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on July 27, 2009. The theme for both the workshop and Image’s twentieth anniversary year, now concluding, was “Fully Human: Art and the Religious Sense.” BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, a bishop of…