Articles

The summer issue of Image includes four poems by Nicholas Samaras, one of which was influenced by Michael Sitaras’ conceptual art project, Sacred Air. All poems are part of his work on a book of poems in response to the biblical Psalms. We asked Nicholas how these poems began.   Image: You’ve been working on…

Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch A FEW WEEKS AGO, I sat in my office reading Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye to All That” and came upon a line that sent me reeling back into my past: “Was there ever someone so young?” The question struck me…

I SOMETIMES CARRY a rosary these days, a Spanish one of wooden beads that a friend gave to me. I used to think that it reflected the same impulse as needlework, which I do inexpertly—a desire for the consolation of repetition. Now I consider it a spiritual discipline, as I try, in middle age, to…

Departures: Journeys with Asian Filmmakers   I’M HALFWAY OVER the Atlantic on a 777, and I’ve just unfolded myself from my seat. It feels like needles are threading blood back down through my legs and feet. Teaching myself to walk again, I grimace up the aisle of the darkened plane. As I go, I scan…

Upon Listening to Biber’s Rosary Sonatas Scordatura: Abnormal tuning of a stringed instrument in order to obtain unusual chords, facilitate difficult passages, or change the tone color. —Harvard Dictionary of Music, second edition ALTHOUGH I AM a piano tuner who used to play a violin, I would not dream of referring to the violin as…

DUTCH-CANADIAN, of Midwestern Winnipeg, an ordinary follower of Jesus Christ. This is perhaps the most succinct way to situate the artist Gerald Folkerts. Readers may ask, “Can any artistic good come out of Winnipeg?” Come closer. Take a look. Winnipeg, Manitoba, is not like Bible-belt Alberta, but is hard-working Mennonite farming country. Under God-blue skies,…

What follows is a written conversation between painter Bruce Herman and patron Walter Hansen. The two just completed a three-year project that involved producing a cycle of images on the life of the Virgin Mary in two large altarpieces that have been exhibited in the United States and are now installed semi-permanently in Monastery San…

Eugene Peterson is a pastor and author of more than thirty books, including A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, The Contemplative Pastor, and Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading, one in a multi-volume series of book-length “conversations” in spiritual theology. He has also written a bestselling Bible translation, The…

Madeline DeFrees is the author of two chapbooks and eight full-length poetry collections, including Spectral Waves (Copper Canyon, 2006) and Blue Dusk (Copper Canyon, 2001), winner of the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and a Washington Book Award, as well as two books of nonfiction about convent life. She spent many years as a nun…

after Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise The experts are saving the prophets and their wall, ___the prophets and the law, and the door ______to paradise. What does it profit ________a man to gain the whole, the world Yet to lose, or to loose his head from the Renaissance ___and its gilt-stripped doors of bronze? ______The fire-gilded…