Articles

Boston, 1688 Four years before Salem would lose itself to hysteria, Mather knew already the subtle workings of the devil, how an oak might shrivel overnight, its leaves as brown and parched as hostler’s leather; or a widow’s fields surrender to drought, her sons unable to save them, while a neighbor’s thrived. Only by confession…

The photographs are separated by the turn of the page, so that to look at one is to conceal the other. In the first, reindeer scatter westward, their antlers unblooming trees upon the cave’s wall, their hooves roots snaking through barren rock, seeking distant water. In the second, the scene is repeated, but darkly, stripped…

MY WIFE AND I were living in Sri Lanka when I suddenly found myself baptized into the Roman Catholic Church. I don’t regret it one bit, mind you. But it was surprising at the time. In retrospect, there were signs. My father was sent to Jesuit boarding school as a youth, and though he later left…

Fifty years ago, in Catholic school, a nun gave my mother a ribbon said to have been touched by a saint. This was when her brother was still alive, and masses were still read in Latin, and people still wandered across the street to other people’s houses in the evening. Now the school is coming…

The bay’s mouth swells, sucking the gale and spit into stone lungs, laying the ground for what the island tells, hoarsely: before the boats arrive, after the shops shut. Beach Sand shuffles amiably, like familiar words stroking and nosing one another, melismatic chant that slips and pours so quickly that you never see the razor…

than the angel who eclipsed your ordinary life to see his reflection in the dark of your eyes. More strange than when god thumped in your belly and tugged at your breast, hungry for earth, for what he had made. Strange to hear the command to take and eat of his body just as he…

This winter is a bear in my garden: it sharpens its claws against the oak and snuffs through topsoil to pry loose the hidden bulb. I traced its path in window frost, how the soft pad of its heel pressed me like a child inside the womb until the swift puncture of claw. I breathed…

The Road Behind Us Image’s Founding Generation When Image was founded in 1989, the cultural landscape looked different than it does today. Religious writers and artists felt cold-shouldered in the public square and often ill at ease within the church. The need for a journal that demonstrated the continuing vitality of contemporary art informed by…

The Road Behind Us Image’s Founding Generation When Image was founded in 1989, the cultural landscape looked different than it does today. Religious writers and artists felt cold-shouldered in the public square and often ill at ease within the church. The need for a journal that demonstrated the continuing vitality of contemporary art informed by…