Dear friends, We are entering a season of thanksgiving, and soon we’ll begin a season of reflection as we prepare to celebrate a remarkable birth that changed human history. I begin with thanksgiving. On behalf of all the staff at Image, thank you. Thank you for being part of our community. Thank you for your…

I have beauty on the mind. No doubt a result of my ongoing debate with Gregory Wolfe (running into its fourth iteration now). We’ve been chatting, lo these many weeks, about the relevance of the religious voice to contemporary debates on aesthetical matters. When you’re talking about aesthetics, the question of beauty tends to rear…

Church Ladies. Most of them are pretty darn good souls. They’re at the church every day, bent over pews, cleaning the sanctuary, baking pies, and keeping all the committees peopled. They’re also gorgeously individual souls with their own private concerns, loves, and extracurricular interests. But everyone’s probably known at least one church lady like the…

Do you write with a pen? Do you write with the wind? Do you pray first? Do you pray when you are stuck? Do you pray after? Or are you praying the whole way through? Do you wait for the singer on the beach or the sinner in the confession booth to finish before you…

When I read Austin Segrest’s “Plowboy’s Bible,” I began to realize that the entire poem was made up of nothing more than a series of phrases. The phrases veered wildly between images and concepts that were relatively intelligible to exotic, almost surreal metaphors. Slowly it dawned on me that I had read a poem like…

As a little girl, I remember watching the grownups in my hometown Episcopal church cross themselves, and feeling like there was a secret I was not yet privy to but wanted to know. Sometime in high school, I started crossing myself at will, at the “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” mentions, but also before and…

Clare Vanderpool, Newbery Medal-winning author of the novels Moon over Manifest (Delacorte, 2010) and Navigating Early (Delacorte, 2013), got her start by attending a writing workshop at The Milton Center, with which Image was associated in its early years and whose programs are now run by Image. While under a Milton fellowship in the mid-90s,…

Clare Vanderpool, Newbery-Medal winning author of the novels Moon over Manifest (Delacorte, 2010) and Navigating Early (Delacorte, 2013), got her start by attending a writing workshop at The Milton Center, with which Image was associated in its early years and whose programs are now run by Image. While under a Milton fellowship in the mid-90s,…

I once took modern dance technique classes with an instructor who asked the dancers to stand in a two parallel lines, facing each other; one line of tired bodies with eyes shut, the other line observant. While our eyes were closed, he asked us to make all of our bodies’ thirty-seven trillion cells seen. It’s…

What do we understand? What do we even mean by “understanding”? A poem can pose these questions, explicitly or implicitly. Amy McCann’s “Winter Song” does both. She wonders what her father was thinking, was understanding, on a long-ago cold morning before she was born. Meanwhile she, in the warm womb, was a “restless / percussion…