More on: God

Red Rock Canyon, Nevada  I’m trying to follow the letters my brother’s toe outlines in the air as he twitches through an invisible alphabet to rehab the frayed ligaments. Pointe work penance for a former fútbol player, as he describes the gentle donkeys last year in Red Rock Canyon, how they nosed his hand, nuzzled…

Gauzed shine on the infinite, the moondog blooms like a distant searchlight left of the moon, almost unmoving to the naked eye, as if tracking a slow-drifting object, like one of the balloons wafting into North Korea, balloons with winter socks tied to them, or one of Chagall’s ethereal blue bodies above a nameless Russian…

CAR HEADLIGHTS from the Miami traffic outside brushed along the upper chapel walls, grazing the stained-glass windows and the cross suspended there. Ever since Esteban and I had entered the Lutheran church on Fifty-Seventh, we’d been silent. I shifted in the pew. Although Esteban had been carting me to youth group all of freshman year, this…

A chain of blue-white chips mimics waves pleating around Christ’s body. On the western wall, another scene of owl-eyed saints drawing light unlike us. Despite centuries of votive smoke, the shining ranks of prophets gesture, elegant as sommeliers, toward mosaic scrolls and would have you consider the honeycombed geometry of paradise—dome, arch, and column— it’s…

In my mouth the name of God an overripe pear: a grain, a grit on the tongue. A grail, all vowel-shaped gaps, like lipping the rim of an empty cup, that low-frequency opening undoing, unhinging the jaw. God’s name as eyetooth, meat-intended, a visible skeletal hint. God as salve for chalk. For the bent heart,…

So many things to see in this old world But all I can see is you. —“Together Alone,” 1970 The following is excerpted from Bruce Cockburn’s memoir, Rumours of Glory, forthcoming this November from HarperOne.   IN LATE 1966 I WAS INTRODUCED to two people, in very different circumstances, who would have a profound effect…

Each chapter of Lauren F. Winner’s new book, Wearing God: Clothing, Laughter, Fire, and Other Overlooked Ways of Meeting God (HarperOne), explores a single biblical image of God through a mix of exegesis, cultural history, and personal essay. The chapter excerpted in issue 84 is about bread. Image’s Mary Kenagy Mitchell recently asked Winner about her…

Ecologies of Knowing: What Natalie Settles Learned in the Lab   IN 2011, NATALIE SETTLES sat down for coffee and a conversation with Stephen Tonsor, head of an evolutionary plant genetics lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Settles had recently moved to Pittsburgh after a decade in Madison, Wisconsin, where she had been fascinated with and…

When Adam saw her, muscle of a new day, when he squatted to smell the musk between her legs, when he leaned down To grasp the wrist of the most familiar creature he’d encountered yet, to pull himself, the mirror image of himself, to her feet; When he took a few steps back to appraise…

In Anselm Kiefer’s Am Anfang A ladder rises like a DNA helix Out of the seething flux, an ocean Of broken glass, shattered light, The bonds just barely linking there, Chiral, as yet un-living, into proto- Membrane, proto-cell, accreting In the sugary stew of their forming, The nucleotides surging tidal As they begin to spiral…