Articles

GREG WOLFE,  Image founder, editor, publisher—and as I occasionally like to tease, indefatigable empire builder—has written many provocative essays. One of my favorites is “The Christian Writer in a Fragmented Culture,” which appeared in issue 7 in 1994. In the beginning of the essay, Greg muses on the dilemma of publishing a journal highlighting the intersection of…

Art and the Religious Sense To say that someone is “only human” is to say two things at once. We mean that person is flawed—and that this condition is no more than we should expect. Yet for all our awareness of human frailty and venality, we are haunted by visions of human flourishing, fullness rather…

In the current issue of Image, #59, in an excerpt from a new book titled God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art, Dan Siedell wrote about the importance of an “educated appetite” to understanding contemporary art. We sat down to ask him about how we go about developing such an appetite.   Image: I…

In 1987, three years after Harper’s heralded her as the “Queen of Christian Rock,” Leslie Phillips sang these words: “You lock me up / with your expectations / Loosen the pressure you’ve choked me with / I can’t breathe.” That song appeared on an album called The Turning, and the title spoke of her decision…

Has birth ever peeled you apart Has birth ever hollowed you out For I have seen a woman being transfigured Into lips her water breaking like the first Ocean spilling between the thighs of creation And then between those lips her firstborn crowning Like a tongue that dips to test the light and scalds Have…

like a slap, like a bone, like a spice, like a thought gone still in the light, another kind of sorrow, a kind of life, a cheek stroked, then freckled. Its rhythm amounts to injury, to a small space. No singing. Just a sack of air, a soiled shirt, more sermonizing that picks away at…

Like a dark miracle, they sleep, two am at a truck stop outside Indianapolis; my husband of three cities, three years— flycatcher, scrub jay, kingfisher; our baby daughter, little chickadee, pale wrinkle, my inkling. A motherless girl who now mothers, I am loved twice, two orchids, two glimpses of the afterlife, two clear-wing butterflies, two…

However innocent your life may have been, no Christian ought to venture to die in any other state than that of the penitent. —————————————————–—Saint Augustine I have been sodden with wine. I have been confused by wine. I have been lied to by men, And yet, I lie down upon such men, Still and willing…

Night girl, your book is full. You have drawn all the pictures. You have seen many weepers. Rainbows held your sky in place, and sorrows bloomed about you like flowers. Moons floated on your lakes and washed them. Stars lit your river beds, and songs adorned your chest with garlands. When a bird sings when…

Long after the sun falls into the sea and twilight slips off the horizon like a velvet sheet and the air gets soaked in blackness, long after clouds hover above like boulders and stars crawl up and fill the sky, long after bodies tangle dance and falter and fatigue blows in and bends them and…