More on: grace

Stirring among the pines. The sapling’s leaves like oval wings tremble. Between the whoofs of startled deer, echoing, an echoing clear creed of some unvanquished mystery— night-rising crows humbling their caws below the oaky whoo of the boreal owl. Below that, what? Threads of wood, a bed of pine, the needles strewn in love beside…

by these and countless other dear / impediments, I stoop to find / my knees

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…