Posts by Image Staff
Children Need Stories That Tell the Truth About Life and Death
September 6, 2019
Stories that offer an easy answer to life’s sorrows may seem soothing so long as we remain privileged, cocooned, unaware of the violence of human history, but stories that leave us troubled and uncertain are the ones we can take with us when we are exiled from this narrow shelter.
Read MoreBetween Friends: Raymond Carver’s “Viewfinder”
Decades ago, in Orange County, California, Jennifer Hawk and Tania Runyan shared a number of high school 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 they’ve developed a deep relationship over the years, sharing their lives and their…
Read MoreLooking for Pope Joan: Meet Mirren Kessling
August 28, 2019
Mirren Kessling Mirren Kessling is a British visual artist based between London and Oxfordshire. She graduated from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, in 2016 with a BFA and has subsequently shown at Modern Art Oxford and Cube Gallery London. Much of Kessling’s practice is directly or tangentially related to the story of…
Read MoreIn This Here Place, We Flesh: Black Bodies in Art and Church
Black people are producing—have always produced—creative works of theology that must be seriously considered within the mainstream of Christian tradition if we are to dismantle white supremacy.
Read MoreThe Convert’s Zeal
August 22, 2019
I intermittently check in with an online social media group interested in the reunion of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. It will seem a fringe concern to some, but I’m rarely in the peak of the bell curve when it comes to such things. The group page offers a mixed bag of links to incisive…
Read MoreGilding Mortality
August 20, 2019
At first sight, the gallery feels stark. When I turned the corner at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts and saw All That Glitters, a solo show by Mandy Cano Villalobos, that was my first impression from a distance: a sterile chill. More shadow than glow; more somber than glitter. But as I inched…
Read MoreBound by a Common Anguish: D.L. Mayfield Interviews Casey Cep
August 19, 2019
Casey N. Cep is a writer whose work tends towards thoughtfulness, with an eye for stories that are haunted by faith. Her work appears often in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and her first book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee was recently published by Knopf. Here,…
Read MoreTouching Eternity: A Conversation with Scott Cairns and Malcolm Guite
Malcolm Guite is a priest, poet, songwriter, and chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge. He’s also served as a chaplain at our Glen Workshops in Santa Fe. I came to know Guite’s work through the online community Sick Pilgrim, where his book, Sounding the Seasons, a collection of sonnets inspired by the liturgical year,…
Read MoreFaith, Justice, Beauty: Carolyn Forché’s Levertov Award Lecture
Image is a religious journal, but maybe not in the way you’d expect. Our executive editor, Mary Kenagy Mitchell, says that “we give voice to writers who are devout, or full of doubt. The grapplers, the joyful, the angry, the bereaved, the confused. The connecting thread is the effort to get language and…
Read MoreLittle Girls
August 15, 2019
It wasn’t until I read about the school uniforms that I thought the Jeffrey Epstein case had anything to do with me. The story broke right before we went on our too-short summer vacation to the borrowed house overlooking the blue Atlantic. There, I sat on the deck with my laptop and read all the…
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