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In the conversation around faith and film, Ron Austin is an elder statesman. He has worked a lifetime in the entertainment industry, and his essays and books, including In a New Light: Spirituality and Media Arts, have influenced generations of filmmakers (much of his writing is also on his website). His seminal essay “The Spiritual…

Fathers & Sons, Divine & Human Writer-director Rodrigo García makes film and television about human connection, or the lack thereof. The movie Mother and Child (2009), episodes of his shows In Treatment (2008–10) and Carnivàle (2003–05), and others reflect on the question of how to find love, give it, and figure out what we’re really…

Mira Nair describes herself as “an Indian filmmaker at home in the world.” Odisha born, Harvard educated, and living in Uganda, she brings a vibrant multiculturalist sensibility to exuberant, humane, and honest tales of people trying to get along in a world where joy and struggle meet by the minute. Best known for her films…

Van Gessel has been Shūsaku Endō’s primary English translator since the 1970s. He has translated eight of his novels and worked as a consultant on Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Silence. We asked him about the previously untranslated Endō story in Image issue 92, and about what Endō’s work has to say to the West. Can…

James McMichael was born in Pasadena, California, in 1939. After earning a doctorate at Stanford University, he taught at the University of California Irvine for over forty years. McMichael’s early work consists largely of shorter lyrics and sequences notable for their restraint, subtle musicality, and clarity of perception. These same qualities mark the more expansive…

A former marine biologist, cook, speechwriter, and White House policy advisor, Michael Gruber is a New York Times–bestselling writer who work infuses genre fiction with philosophical and supernatural themes. His books include the Jimmy Paz trilogy (Tropic of Night, Valley of Bones, and Night of the Jaguar) and thrillers about Shakespeare (The Book of Air…

Rudy Wiebe was born in 1934 in Speedwell, a small Mennonite community in northern Saskatchewan. His parents had fled Russia in 1930 and became part of the last generation of homesteaders to settle the Canadian West. In 1947 Wiebe’s family moved to southern Alberta. Wiebe studied literature at the University of Alberta and the University…

Issue 89 features the work of graffiti and installation artist Mohammed Ali, whose murals appear in cities all over the world, from his native Birmingham to Melbourne, Dubai, and Kuala Lumpur. He also performs collaboratively with musicians and poets. In the accompanying essay, George Dardess describes the way Ali sees his work as part of…

Charles Wright is the author of nearly thirty collections of poetry, most recently Sestets, Bye-and-Bye, and Caribou (all from Farrar, Straus and Giroux), as well as two books of criticism and a collection of translations of the Italian poet Eugenio Montale. Born in 1935 in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee, Wright attended Davidson College and the Iowa…

Painters Frame Contemporary Painting Painting has died and been resurrected several times in recent decades. Challenged by theory-laden conversations about art’s “post-medium” condition and a welter of deconstructionist propositions, painting seems nevertheless to have thrived in the face of adversity. Some would say it remains as manifold and imaginative as ever. In order to take…