James K.A. Smith Archives

Haunted Humanism: Monsters and Mystery in Contemporary Fiction

By James K.A. Smith Editorial Issue 120

Dwelling contemplatively is hard. The imagination is, for too many, a foreign country. Arguing about is easier than being. Perhaps this is true in the same way that it’s safer and more comfortable to talk about God than risk actual encounter.

Watching Movies with Augustine: On Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon

By James K.A. Smith Editorial Issue 119

When I go to the movies—well, when I go anywhere—Saint Augustine is always nearby. He lives in my head (and heart) rent free.

Gego’s Hands: Valuing the Body in Art

By James K.A. Smith Editorial Issue 118

The body that gives poetry. The body that picks up the brush or tackles the clay or sets its hand to write a poem. If, at Image, our imagination is nourished by God incarnate, we are also nourished by a body given.

Incident and Significance: A Conversation with Christopher Beha

By James K.A. Smith Interview Issue 117

My relationship to the novel form is among the most important relationships in my life.

Everything Is Material: Yxta Maya Murray and the Cost of Making Art

By James K.A. Smith Editorial Issue 117

I did not expect a novel about a bisexual Latinx conceptual artist in Los Angeles to hinge on the question of whether art-making is compatible with motherhood. Then I read Yxta Maya Murray’s dazzling Art Is Everything.

Obliqueness and Extravagance: A Conversation with Rowan Williams and Shane McCrae

By James K.A. Smith Interview Issue 115

If poetry has nothing else to say, it says this: this world is much more peculiar than you imagine.

Something Other than Devotion: Bored with the Renaissance, Surprised by the Contemporary

By James K.A. Smith Editorial Issue 115

Unlike a pilgrimage to the Uffizi, Paolini’s installations ask for something other than devotion; his work occasioned in me a kind of wondering that was something other than awe. It invites conversation rather than adulation. The artist is relinquishing control rather than demanding attention.

The Aesthete and the Monk: Against Moralism

By James K.A. Smith Editorial Issue 114

Can the aesthetic life lead us to God?

What You See Is You: Rowan Williams and the Art that Surrenders

By James K.A. Smith Editorial Issue 113

The microcosmic richness of human identity is a reflection of the God who not only made us but sees us, knows us, and speaks to us. Our being addressed by the divine is an infinite well for human possibility.