More on: miracles

For Image’s inaugural issue, editor Harold Ficket interviewed the Presbyterian minister, novelist, and memoirist Frederick Buechner (1926-2022), covering a range of topics of interest: inspiration for his novels, the ambiguity inherent to experiences of the divine, and the faith-informed vision necessary for seeing miracles. “God moves in these elusive, mysterious, ambiguous ways through our lives,”…

JOSHUA WAS THE MOST corpulent man of his people. He would eat anything and everything edible that he laid eyes on: grasshoppers, fruit, eggs, meat, whether raw or cooked, plants and roots and ants; he was always chewing something. He would even devour bones and seedpods, since his eating knew no bounds. His corpulence was not…

The man I imagine walking to Emmaus is the one I saw in Caravaggio’s flesh-and-bone depiction of Christ beckoning the taxman to his side, steady arm outstretched, pointing a finger at the table of cardsharps. It’s a gesture that’s the same in every language and seems to say there’s no time to wait for those…

WHEN CALEB WAS THREE YEARS OLD, he went to his cousin’s house. At the door he was met by a little girl holding two coins in one hand while pulling down her bottom lip with the other. She lived a few houses over and was visiting to show off the money she’d been given for…

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…

ON MY BROTHER DECLAN’S third day on life support—the morning he becomes newsworthy—strangers begin to leave messages on the home phone. A funeral director leaves his number. An alarm-system salesman warns of the characters who scour the Globe and the Herald for stories like Declan’s, for tragedies that strike families from well-off towns, leaving their…

In a room at the side of the hand-painted santuario, with its seven-foot cross found glowing one day in the red desert dust, a row of crutches left behind, and walls of photos of the children for whom we pray. Their baby shoes. Their army uniforms. Ourselves in them. Ordinary pains, unending in time as…