Prodigal Sons and Daughters
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 MoreTenebrae
By Short Story Issue 80
CAR HEADLIGHTS from the Miami traffic outside brushed along the upper chapel walls, grazing the stained-glass windows and the cross suspended there. Ever since Esteban and I had entered the Lutheran church on Fifty-Seventh, we’d been silent. I shifted in the pew. Although Esteban had been carting me to youth group all of freshman year, this…
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 MoreKurt Vonnegut, Christ-Loving Atheist
By Essay Issue 82
WHEN I CAME HOME from King’s Chapel on the Sunday I published an article called “Returning to Church” in the New York Times Magazine in 1985, I had a message from Kurt Vonnegut on my answering machine. “This is Kurt,” his voice said. “I forgive you.” My becoming a Christian again in mid-life (after many…
Read MoreWeb Exclusive: A Conversation with Christian Wiman
By Interview Issue 81
Christian Wiman, former editor of Poetry and current faculty member at the Yale Divinity School, has four poems in Image issue 81. We asked him to talk about what went into the writing of them. Image: You’ve been interviewed a great deal lately about some rather large topics: illness, death, faith, doubt, and beyond.…
Read MoreWeb Exclusive: A Conversation with Dan Wakefield
By Interview Issue 82
Dan Wakefield recently edited a book of the letters of Kurt Vonnegut, with whom he maintained a literary friendship over four decades. Though Vonnegut is often associated with the skepticism and iconoclasm of the sixties and seventies, faith held a mystique for him. At times he called himself a “Christ-loving atheist” and “a Christ-worshipping agnostic.”…
Read MoreA Conversation with David Bazan
By Interview Issue 82
Singer-songwriter David Bazan was frontman of the indie-rock band Pedro the Lion for ten years, recording four albums and five EPs. He has also recorded with side projects including Headphones, Undertow Orchestra, and Overseas. In 2005, Bazan began touring and recording under his own name, starting with the EP Fewer Moving Parts. With Pedro the…
Read MoreDarwin and the Problem of Time
By Book Review Issue 85
Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It by Loren Eiseley (Doubleday, 1958) Science and Faith: A New Introduction by John F. Haught (Paulist, 2013) Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love by Elizabeth A. Johnson (Bloomsbury, 2014) Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith by Philip Kitcher (Oxford, 2007) …
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 MoreThe Feverfew
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…
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