Converted
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 MoreThe Search for Epiphany
By Essay Issue 80
The Road Ahead Voices for the Next Twenty-Five Years Many gifted artists and writers of faith working today were just learning how to read and hold their crayons when Image was founded. They never experienced the culture wars of the eighties that weighed so heavily on an older generation; theirs are a different set of…
Read MoreHow the Light Gets In
By Essay Issue 80
The Road Ahead Voices for the Next Twenty-Five Years Many gifted artists and writers of faith working today were just learning how to read and hold their crayons when Image was founded. They never experienced the culture wars of the eighties that weighed so heavily on an older generation; theirs are a different set of…
Read MoreByzantine Gold
By Poetry Issue 80
A chain of blue-white chips mimics waves pleating around Christ’s body. On the western wall, another scene of owl-eyed saints drawing light unlike us. Despite centuries of votive smoke, the shining ranks of prophets gesture, elegant as sommeliers, toward mosaic scrolls and would have you consider the honeycombed geometry of paradise—dome, arch, and column— it’s…
Read MoreAltricial
By Poetry Issue 80
What offers a skeletal peep. Feather-smear, mostly gullet—agape for the secondhand upchuck grub, bolus crammed iridescent with carapace and wing. A holiness, this helplessness, the mother’s tireless, kenotic reconnaissance ending every time with her head bent to her nest of tidbit beggars, X-ray translucent, the tinder of their bones radiant beneath. All hollow. The aerate…
Read MoreAccording
By Poetry Issue 80
In my mouth the name of God an overripe pear: a grain, a grit on the tongue. A grail, all vowel-shaped gaps, like lipping the rim of an empty cup, that low-frequency opening undoing, unhinging the jaw. God’s name as eyetooth, meat-intended, a visible skeletal hint. God as salve for chalk. For the bent heart,…
Read MoreCloud of Unknowing: Twenty-Five Years of Image
By Essay Issue 80
…when you first begin to undertake [contemplation], all that you find is a darkness, a sort of cloud of unknowing…. This darkness and cloud is always between you and your God, no matter what you do, and it prevents you from seeing him clearly by the light of understanding in your reason and from experiencing…
Read MoreWeb Exclusive: A Conversation with Natalie Settles
By Interview Issue 85
Artist Natalie Settles, featured in Image issue 85, has long been fascinated by the biological sciences. She makes drawings and installation art that mix highly detailed botanical and zoological imagery with highly stylized forms, like Victorian decorative motifs. Her installation works are interactive; they use a gallery space to create an ecosystem in which the viewer…
Read MoreImmersed in Mystery
By Essay Issue 85
Reading from Two Books: Nature, Scripture, and Evolution In the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians described nature as a book, a coherent work in which we could glimpse the mind of God. Like scripture, the book of nature bore the divine imprint—the Imago Dei—and the two books were seen as complementary. In the centuries…
Read MoreNoah Buchanan and the Renewal of Mystery
By Essay Issue 81
IT WAS THE FIRST FULL DAY of the fall semester at the New York Academy of Art, and California artist Noah Buchanan was riding the Number 2 subway to lower Manhattan’s Tribeca district where he would disembark five blocks south of the school. The Brazilian beat of Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints thrummed on…
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