Fugitive Energies
By Essay Issue 28
IN his essay, “How the West Lost Its Story,” theologian Robert W. Jenson argues that we postmoderns no longer inhabit what he calls a “narratable world.” The heart of Western civilization, he notes, has been the biblical story, which posited a coherent, dramatic narrative—a world that had a beginning, middle, and at least a vision…
Read MoreStrange Pilgrims
By Essay Issue 42
IN HIS his masterful book The Life You Save May Be Your Own (reviewed in this issue), Paul Elie has crafted a braided narrative about the lives and works of four twentieth-century American Catholic writers, all of whom have become canonical figures: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy. The first sentence of…
Read MoreThe Lord Spoke to the Fish
By Poetry Issue 88
Jonah 2:10 I knew a whale in California who said it was a descendant of the great fish God prepared for Jonah. On the darkest nights when everyone felt alone, it told great stories of the great fish. Often, it would chuckle as it spoke of its ancestor. The young whales would honor it by…
Read MoreThe Superhero and His People
By Essay Issue 63
I want a hero: an uncommon want, When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one ——————Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto the First A SUPERHERO MOVIE is foremost an entertainment, often kitschy, sometimes trashy, but regardless, it is…
Read MoreStory
By Essay Issue 75
The Word-Soaked World Troubling the Lexicon of Art and Faith Since 1989, Image has hosted a conversation at the nexus of art and faith among writers and artists in all forms. As the conversation has evolved, certain words have cropped up again and again: Beauty. Mystery. Presence. For this issue, we invited a handful of…
Read MoreTemple Gaudete
By Poetry Issue 81
Deus homo factus est Natura mirante. Is love the start of a journey back? If so, back where, & make it holy. Saint Cerulean Warbler, blue blur, heart on the lam, courses arterial branches, combing up & down, embolic, while inside I punch down & fold a floe of dough to make…
Read MoreSyllable Nutshell
By Poetry Issue 83
G is for onset, kickoff, square one, raging beginning of in the beginning out of the starting gate, raw originality in original sense, and if consonantal sine qua non for vanity plates. O is for nucleus, sonorous meat in a syllable sandwich, bellybutton earful, always a vowel, animal imperative enough in itself to tell the…
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