Articles

King’s yellow for the king’s hair and halo, mixed if the monastery can’t afford the shell gold or gold leaf to crown the Lord, to work the letters of his name, the Chi-Ro, in trumpet spirals and triquetras, the yellow a cheap and lethal burnishing, the hoard not gold but arsenic and sulfur. The Word…

for the Twelve-foot Tall Dancing Icons of Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, California In a church in a city on the edge of the world The risen Christ dances Over the heads of the congregants Who are also dancing The risen Christ dances With all the saints—certified or surprised Who are…

We are walking in the mild midwinter Snow and thin ice, up Coldwater Creek, Its many tributaries, their steep ravines Tracing the blue and brown lines that wind Dizzily over the unfolded whiteness of our new Map like staves for the crazy earth song we’ve been Sight-reading with our feet; we are singing the impossible…

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb…. —John 20 She came to take care of the body. Some are like that. They feel the need to touch and handle _____where life was. We call it seeking closure. We call it clinging. We call it having difficulty facing reality; the reality that life itself _____has left…

GWEN LIVED IN LOS ANGELES and her brother Dan lived in Chicago. They sent each other spoof news reports, fake X-ray glasses, envelopes full of plastic ants. After the horrible-smelling flowers were delivered to her at work—“What is that, road kill?” asked her friend—Gwen gleefully bought a pound of chocolates, stuck her thumb through the bottom…

A Narrative of Howling Wolf, 1875–78 Fort Marion Prisoner, Saint Augustine, Florida   THE WAVES KEPT COMING like the cavalry. We stood on the wall of the fort and stared at the water. We rocked back and forth with the waves. We were prisoners of the Plains Indian Wars. We were stultified. We were sick.…

IN  1994, THREE SPELUNKERS were looking for undiscovered caves in the Ardèche region of southeastern France. The region is named after the Ardèche River, which has cut through limestone for millennia and created hundreds of caves. On a summer weekend expedition they came across a place in a cliff wall where they sensed a draft…

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…

John Kohan’s calling to sacred art began early: “Sacred art has been a lifelong preoccupation, judging from the earliest sketch of mine my mother saved. It is a pencil illustration of Jesus’ parable of “The Sower and the Seed”…drawn when I was a child of six or so.” Since age six, John has worked as…

WHEN MY FATHER’S PEOPLE came down from the Appalachians to work in the mills and mines of north Alabama, they brought with them a desire for strong drink, loose women, and visitations by the Holy Ghost. A census taker who interviewed some of these Covingtons noted that they were illiterate, and then also checked the…