Another Idiot Psalm
By Poetry Issue 68
by these and countless other dear / impediments, I stoop to find / my knees
Read MoreThe Age of Loss
By Poetry Issue 69
You have come to a time when everything is loss— your parents dead, your friends dying or gone south. You have come to a time when you have money and nothing you care to do with it, though you take cruises, spoil the grandkids, redecorate the house, which, schooled in irony, echoes as if abandoned.…
Read MoreFrom the Lines of Life: Guy Chase and the Art of the (Extra)Ordinary
By Essay Issue 72
Although preparation for this article began in 2008, by the time it was completed Guy Chase had begun to lose his fight with cancer. He approved a near-final draft a few months before slipping away in his sleep on August 18, 2011, at the age of fifty-six. I am for an art that grows…
Read MoreHirudo Medicinalis
By Poetry Issue 70
It is hard to be misunderstood. And how many of us get vindication after a century or so? I mistook the little bloodsucker for a wad of gauze as it whirled from the sailor’s spliced thumb. It became an iridescent helix, a liquid amber’s leaf dangling through a day-long spring and fall and spring, Have…
Read MoreThe Operation of Grace
By Essay Issue 70
The following is adapted from a commencement address given for the Seattle Pacific University master of fine arts in creative writing on August 6, 2011. I’D LIKE TO SHARE a few thoughts with you that I hope are appropriate for the occasion, words derived from two texts we’ve studied together, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets…
Read MoreA Spade is Not a Spade: The Art of Fabian Debora and the Mystery of Los Angeles
By Essay Issue 71
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…
Read MoreDiscipline
By Essay Issue 75
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…
Read MoreCotton Mather Examines Four Children Afflicted by Witchcraft
By Poetry Issue 80
Boston, 1688 Four years before Salem would lose itself to hysteria, Mather knew already the subtle workings of the devil, how an oak might shrivel overnight, its leaves as brown and parched as hostler’s leather; or a widow’s fields surrender to drought, her sons unable to save them, while a neighbor’s thrived. Only by confession…
Read MoreConverted
By Essay Issue 80
MY WIFE AND I were living in Sri Lanka when I suddenly found myself baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. I don’t regret it one bit, mind you. But it was surprising at the time. In retrospect, there were signs. My father was sent to Jesuit boarding school as a youth, and though he later left…
Read MoreStudying with You
By Essay Issue 80
The Road Behind Us Image’s Founding Generation When Image was founded in 1989, the cultural landscape looked different than it does today. Religious writers and artists felt cold-shouldered in the public square and often ill at ease within the church. The need for a journal that demonstrated the continuing vitality of contemporary art informed by…
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