More on: function of art

Ron Hansen’s novels are Desperadoes, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (both from Knopf), Mariette in Ecstasy, Atticus, Hitler’s Niece, and Isn’t It Romantic? (all from HarperCollins). Atticus was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Hansen is also the author of the story collection Nebraska…

A longer version of this essay appears as the introduction to God in the Gallery: A Christian Approach to Modern Art, forthcoming this fall from Baker Academic, a division of Baker Publishing Group, copyright 2008.    For my wife, Kerri, and children, Daniel, Morgan, and Jacob WE THINK WE KNOW what art is. And that…

Madeline DeFrees is the author of two chapbooks and eight full-length poetry collections, including Spectral Waves (Copper Canyon, 2006) and Blue Dusk (Copper Canyon, 2001), winner of the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Washington Book Award, as well as two books of nonfiction about convent life. She spent many years as a nun…

Neighbors, Strangers,  Family, Friends Four Artists Reflect on Charis The traveling art exhibition Charis—Boundary Crossings: Neighbors Strangers Family Friends features work by seven Asian and seven North American artists. The show grew out of a two-week seminar in Indonesia sponsored by Calvin College’s Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity and the Council for…

We played the flute for you and you did not dance…. ——————————————–—Matthew 11:17 IN HIS INTRODUCTION to a collection of medieval Welsh tales, the late John Updike describes his reaction: we feel in reading these stories, he says, “as if we are dancing with a partner who hears a distinctly different music.” The Charis exhibit—an…

Gregory Orr is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Concerning the Book that Is the Body of the Beloved and How Beautiful the Beloved (both from Copper Canyon). Long known for his condensed and crafted style, in his recent work, Orr demonstrates a shift toward the personal lyric at its most stripped-down,…

THEY WILL ALL LEAVE, first my brother-in-law, who is frank about his tastes, and then the others, borne away on several tides of pretext—the bathroom, pots on the stove, the freshening of drinks—from which none return. Now it’s just me watching, lying belly down on the bed where I used to sleep with my wife.…

THE SPADE, ACCORDING to artist and former East Los Angeles gang member Fabian “Spade” Debora, is the craftiest card in the deck, the card that “takes all. The spade is a subtle and powerful symbol.” From that childhood insight, gleaned growing up in one of Los Angeles’s most violent public housing projects, came the graffiti…

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…

Forward into the Dark: Twenty-Five Years of Ambition   IN “THE IRRATIONAL ELEMENT IN POETRY,” Wallace Stevens explains that the unknown “excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom…. [W]e may resent the consideration of [the unknown] by any except the most lucid minds; but when so considered,…