Articles

THE ROYAL SOAP OPERA that is the life and reign of Henry VIII evokes endless fascination both in the realms of scholarship and the popular imagination. Erudite tomes heavy with footnotes, racy novels the size of toaster ovens, and sumptuously staged television miniseries pour forth in a steady stream. And what’s not to like? For…

My words verge on silence like great birds that disappear into the early evening: their strenuous white wings carry off the intense sweetness of dusk, visible then in starlight. My words turn toward the night with no look back at what is lost or won, or what is missing, like those workers, who, utterly fatigued…

You enter that light which binds night and day, that swirling mist of pain, fortunate pain, which has no need to be seen. It shimmers on the ever-present, ever- inactual shore. Simple worker, like those who build men’s houses— Breathe life into the whirlwind where the dead shall find you, dear friends absorbed in daylight.…

Matter, mother, Maria Names that come from the beginning With tractor or dragged plow or pick, shovel, spade, hoe, black, reddish, parched, mud-caked, the earth is hard to break. Men labor over it as over a woman virgin even after giving birth, laboring as on a sea whose waves close above him—foam, blossom—as men work…

We played the flute for you and you did not dance…. ——————————————–—Matthew 11:17 IN HIS INTRODUCTION to a collection of medieval Welsh tales, the late John Updike describes his reaction: we feel in reading these stories, he says, “as if we are dancing with a partner who hears a distinctly different music.” The Charis exhibit—an…

Poxes of the sun or of the mind bring the force-ten firestorms. After come same-surname funerals, junked theory, praise of mateship. Love the gum forest, camp out in it but death hosts your living in it, brother. You need buried space and cellars have a convict fetor: only pubs kept them. Houses shook them off…

i.m. Matt Laffan 1970–2009 Four villages in Ireland knew never to mingle their blood but such lore gets lost in the emigrations. Matt Laffan’s parents learned it in their marriage of genes they would not share again. They raised him up through captaincies and law degrees. He exalted them with his verve and clarities, sat…

They went on and on, singing “In Memory Forever,” Though it seemed, rather, that what there was to remember Was only things falling apart, ice under the eaves, And the singing itself. On and on they went as they counted, recalling How many of them earth’s ice-mold had covered, While here and there hysterical women…

William Dyrness is a professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary. His latest book is Poetic Theology (Eerdmans). He was Image’s Artist of the Month in June 2001. Image issue 67 features his essay on the vision of Christ in the paintings of Georges Rouault. We asked Dyrness why he is so drawn…

THE YEAR 1992 marked the release of a film that challenged all conventional notions of filmmaking—and that nevertheless received nearly universal critical acclaim, much to the surprise of its makers. That film was Baraka. Filmed at 152 locations in twenty-four countries on six continents with no narrative or dialogue, Baraka was described as “a guided…