More on: family

IN 2016, SAINT PATRICK’S DAY falls on a Thursday, bringing with it an early weekend. In the aftermath of apocalyptic north-central Texas thunderstorms, a sultry heat settles on the quiet residential street in Fort Worth where artist Sedrick Huckaby is hard at work preparing for his next exhibition. Huckaby is a painter, sculptor, and printmaker…

The pain passes, ——but the beauty remains.                             —Renoir Wandering the Musée de l’Orangerie with my sister, we find a bouquet of roses painted in 1878 by Auguste Renoir, voluptuous white roses placed in a red velvet chair. My sister says Renoir’s last word was “flowers” and that toward the end of his life he…

Someone tells someone she knows someone who writes fiction and memoir. The second someone, or party of the second part, asks the party of the third part if she would read a short essay by his wife, who died last year of ovarian cancer. How could the party of the third part refuse? No longer…

This sadness I feel tonight is not my sadness. Maybe it’s my father’s. For having never been prized by his father. For having never profited by his son. This loneliness is Nobody’s. Nobody’s lonely because Nobody was never born and will never die. This gloom is Someone Else’s. Someone Else is gloomy because he’s always…

AMMA IS COMING to live in Richmond,” Mom announced one night at the dinner table. Elizabeth and I looked at each other quickly. Which of us would have to give up her bedroom? Immediately I began constructing an argument in my mind, listing the reasons why Elizabeth’s room would be more suitable for Amma—it was farther…

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…

Walter Brueggemann is professor emeritus of Old Testament studies at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, where he taught from 1986 to 2003. He has authored hundreds of articles and over sixty books, including Genesis (Westminster John Knox, 1982), The Message of the Psalms (Fortress, 1984), Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile (Fortress, 1986), Hope…

PETE DZIEDZIC’S TEETH lay buried a half-mile south of the Da Nang Air Base. There the lance corporal had quarreled with a private over who’d recorded “Sea of Love.” Guys in the outfit were singing along to Armed Forces Radio when Pete said, “That singer’s from the northern U.S.” “He’s from my hometown,” replied the…