Today’s conversation is with Image’s new visual arts editor, Aaron Rosen. Aaron is Professor of Religion & Visual Culture and Director of the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary. But he also generates and participates in conversations about religion and the arts outside of academia. He’s…

By the time my father announced he would be retiring after forty-two years of ministry, his presence—perhaps even more than God’s—was wrapped up in the meaning of church for me. Except for visits home, I hadn’t gone to church for the past ten years I’d lived hundreds of miles away. By the time I moved…

This is a love story. If there is such a thing as the Gospel of Fleabag, then this is how it begins. In the beginning, there was Fleabag herself, patron saint of jumpsuits, standing at the bathroom sink, face smeared inexplicably with blood. She glances at the camera—at you—and smiles. “This is a love story,”…

Decades ago, in the faraway land of Orange County, California, Jennifer Hawk and Tania Runyan shared a number of classes but traveled in different social circles. Tania was scary nerdy awkward—E.T. and Laura Ingalls’ lovechild–and Jen was scary sexy cool, black eyeliner, skateboards, and bands Tania couldn’t pronounce. But in the past few years they’ve…

Ascent I’m under headphones above 10,000 feet, and Aretha Franklin is flying the plane. At least it feels that way. Anne and I are headed to what we call “a homecoming,” an annual gathering of authors at the edge of the Frio River in the Texas hill country — inspirations, influences, kindred spirits. I’m feeling…

Silas House’s most recent book is Southernmost, a literary page-turner about an evangelical pastor who kidnaps his own son after standing up against intolerance in a small rural community. Southernmost is a meditation on love and its consequences in a quickly changing America. Among the book’s honors are the Weatherford Award in Appalachian Literature and a longlisting for…

In their their graphic novel, Zahra’s Paradise, author Amir and illustrator Khalil open with a mundane but striking image for life in Iran. A family’s dog has a litter of puppies, and the boy begins to name them after figures from Persian literature. The father, however, chases the mother dog off with rocks, shouting, “Shoo,…

In a conversation featured in Image 100, poets A. E. Stallings and Adrianne Kalfopoulou recount their experiences with Syrian and other Middle Eastern refugees now living in an unauthorized settlement in Athens, Greece. In bringing the arts to displaced families living on the margins of an ancient city, the two found themselves drawn into the…

Religious imagery has long been a mainstay in the National’s lyrics, and with the release of the band’s eighth album, I Am Easy to Find, it’s clear that frontman Matt Berninger still sees religious language as the best prism to articulate the ever-present human desire for transcendence and salvation. But if the band’s songs are…

It’s a truism that the writer’s material is words. We rely on our words to do their work: to “mean” something. But in his poem “Articulation,” Scott Cairns questions this reliance. The poem’s speaker says that his only “certainty,” paradoxically, is that his language “falls / ever short.” What he has “come to trust” is…