More on: faith

King’s yellow for the king’s hair and halo, mixed if the monastery can’t afford the shell gold or gold leaf to crown the Lord, to work the letters of his name, the Chi-Ro, in trumpet spirals and triquetras, the yellow a cheap and lethal burnishing, the hoard not gold but arsenic and sulfur. The Word…

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…

Abstain from staring too long at the sky. Stick to screens, little keyboards; block out birds with private earbuds; never hear the wind breathe harder. Watch TV. Always drive. Try to avoid a night outside in ladled moonlight, glowing broth. Eschew solitude; cut back on silence; call up someone just to gossip; send lots of…

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…

This issue includes a special section on language that begins on page 35. For writers and artists concerned with faith, words, though slippery, can be like the air we breathe and the water we swim in: the medium that allows for conversation, makes our common life possible, and shapes all our experiences—even, as the distinguished…

Valle de Viñales, Cuba, 2002 In this valley where limestone hills jut out like hairy moles over furrows of tobacco, a rock-face Christ sprawls on a skew cross, as if a child had taken loose chert to etch his fanged mouth, stick legs, twigged fingers. I touch gouged eyes that weep candle wax, caress his…

The art of Steve Prince is explored in an essay by Beth McCoy in Image issue 78. Prince, a New Orleans native, works primarily in printmaking and drawing. His richly textured images are steeped in religious and visual culture; critic D. Eric Bookhardt characterizes their metaphorical power as “an ability to elucidate inexplicable worlds within…

In the middle of the day, I was lost in thought, staring at my newly dead father, or the portion of him the funeral home gave me back in a cheap little plastic urn I’d placed on my study’s mantle. I’d been reading about Bede’s sparrow, which, it turned out, was not Bede’s at all,…

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…

Qui diceris Paraclitus (O Comforter, to Thee we cry) __________—“Veni, Creator Spiritus” Come at me, Comforter. I strain toward your inrushing arrow as it halves then halves then halves the distance that severs us. Till kingdom comes its Zeno-arrow lurches in time lapse, not still where it was, not yet in that place where it…