There was a time, early in my process of conversion to Christianity, when I took Simone Weil as my spiritual guide. And a tough one she was—exactly in the ways that Betsy Sholl elaborates in this poem. The epigraph that Sholl chooses is one of Weil’s many expressions of how the self gets in our…

Maybe it was instinct that sent me back to relive the 1924 Olympic Games. Yesterday you found me despairing, feeling a sudden collapse of my lifelong will to write. Slumped on the couch, I was watching, of all things, Chariots of Fire. As a child, I loved this movie. But it wasn’t until college that…

So, why Chariots of Fire? Why is that what I chose for tonight’s movie? Netflix is recommending all kinds of recent, highly rated titles. Why revisit this old DVD? It happened like this: Two hours earlier, I’d taken the car, planning to drive north to a waterfront park to work on my novel. I planned…

It’s impossible to speak of Kenneth Lonergan’s film Manchester by the Sea without alluding to its major premise: Some events in life simply can’t be overcome. However, stating that conclusion does not betray the work’s plot, because from the outset the story depicts a man upon whom a terrible blow has been dealt. There is…

I spent Christmas Eve with my mom last month for the first time in years. It was unexpected; she was happy and well. All through the drive to my aunt’s house—Dad at the wheel, Mom turning the music up—my sister and I watched the lights and thought about extraordinary transformations. How anything is possible, though…

I love the drama of this poem. Its title recalls St. Francis’s “Canticle of Brother Sun,” where Francis praises God through “Sister Moon,” “Brother Fire,” “Sister Water,” and so on. Jeanne Murray Walker’s Sister Storm, however, is violent and destructive—definitely not, in the poet’s view, an element through which to praise God. The poet talks…

Imagine an alternate history in which a regime arose in the United States that believed in power over equality, profit over values, the privilege of the few over the good of the many, and appearance over truth. Imagine these powers infiltrated the highest offices of our government, and that they began to institute anti-democratic policies,…

As I was looking over Image’s website analytics at the end of 2016, I confess that I was overcome with affection and gratitude for you, our online readers. Your attention has painted a picture, and it is a significantly different picture than many other outlets show. The New Yorker, for example, introduced their most-reads thus: “Americans, as…

I am writing this essay on the fortieth anniversary of my father’s death, so my immediate thought about Martin Luther King, Jr. this morning is of those four precious small children left fatherless on April 4, 1968. There are two things I’m thinking about fathers: The nimbus of their influence continues to fall across your…