More on: violence

When I hear my parents’ voices lilt with Midwestern shame, our pernicious lineage, I want to set the bench on fire or bury an axe head into it.

NOW THAT Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ has reached thousands of screens around the world and the frenzy of editorializing, pre- and post-release, has died down, two of the early questions about the film have been answered. Once the film entered the public domain, most of the fears about whether the film was…

Sister storm, hurling your javelins too near our window, don’t you care if in darkness, we splinter like a bright waterfall, if we catch fire from the sparks you send flying from the grindstone of night? You have cracked our sky with lightning; you have made glass pitchers of our bodies and poured our spirits…

The following four short sermons were delivered at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, between July 28 and August 2, 2008.   All Manner of Travesties: Genesis 4:1-17 The hazards of the creative act are the loam out of which true form emerges. There is no way of achieving true form without opening…

Acclaimed novelist Larry Woiwode is the author of Beyond the Bedroom Wall; What I’m Going to Do, I Think; and Words Made Fresh. His short story “That Old Dog” appears in Image issue 70.   Image: “That Old Dog” is about a famous novelist who hasn’t written a book in a long time. But over the…

Chuck Colson I ARRIVE IN TORONTO during gay pride week. The lampposts lining the city streets fly rainbow flags. Inside the Sheraton are still more rainbows, small ones on sticks stuck into the mulched flowerbeds surrounding the ten-foot waterfall cascading into a pool edged with flagstones. Every time I see one, I can’t help wondering…

Image: In your essay in the new issue of Image, “Power in the Blood: Hollywood and the Myth of Religious Violence,” you write about the strange relationship Hollywood has to Christianity—mainstream Hollywood movies tend to use violent Christians, often broadly stereotypical ones, as villains. They also tend to tell stories where further violence is used to…

Power in the Blood: Hollywood and the Myth of Religious Violence   ON OPENING NIGHT of the 2012 South by Southwest Film Festival, I stood at the end of a line that wrapped around a couple blocks of downtown Austin, Texas. I was in town primarily for work, not festival fun, but I had finagled a…

M Y SISTER, SONDRA, stood on my porch smoking a cigarette, just like she does every Wednesday while her son practices soccer at the school three blocks from my house. “Alisa, you ever been around one of them savants? Like the one that was in that movie Rain Man?” Cigarette smoke rose and fought against the…

I believe in holy theft. Pelvis bone of Saint What’s-His-Name hoisted above famished fields for rain. Knuckle of the Mother for luck. Splinter of manger. Shards, their haloed ephemera. To hold a relic is to change it, under glass, with ropes, a ring of stones. Lord knows to protect love costs a tender violence. Head…