When we bought our new house, a jungle of weeds marked the front yard. I was annoyed. The previous owners—moving out of the state—had obviously phoned in the upkeep in their last months of ownership and I wondered aloud what else they would abandon in their final nights. Would we come home to a clogged…

I got up very early this morning to clean up dog diarrhea, and my husband was finally home from a week of travel for work, so I slipped out for a walk to what used to be the brick house. The brick house was a house just like ours, perched on a higher hill with…

What I didn’t know in June of 1967 was that this month and year for Jews around the world was the moment of great triumph, the moment of saying to Hitler and his legions, you lose, you lose, you lose. Pride moved like a fever throughout Kingston Estates Swim Club, from the Jewish mother with…

How to pray for someone bent over by grief when nature is stretching upward in the June sunshine? This is the question posed by Robert Cording’s “June Prayer.” We learn in the course of the poem that the young son of a woman “I love” has died months ago, and that she asks the poet…

Today Gregory Wolfe continues his periodic exchanges on the nature of beauty with Image contributor Morgan Meis.  Dear Morgan, Well, yesterday you took your swing all right. I just can’t tell if you’ve decked me or…whiffed. In either case, I’m certainly dazed! I told you last time that I have no formal philosophical training, so…

Today Morgan Meis continues his periodic exchanges on the nature of beauty with Image founder Gregory Wolfe. Dear Greg, In your last letter, you asked me not to hesitate in taking a “real swing” at you, philosophically speaking. (Or were you suggesting that this tête-à-tête must inevitably culminate in the back of an alley somewhere?)…

For my husband, Brian Jarboe I learned the news that guitarist Chris Cornell’s death had been declared a suicide on Thursday, May 18—which also happened to be the fourth day in a row I had not managed to get over to the pharmacy to pick up my antidepressant prescription. Which meant that I had not…

I love this poem for its exuberance. The fat bee, “big as a blackberry,” bumping heavily against the pane. The impossibility of an acorn’s power. The very idea of “infant waterfalls.” Each vivid, particular thing of beauty from the natural world that Friman presents to us bears itself simply and humbly—yet appears remarkable when dressed…

Van Gessel has been Shūsaku Endō’s primary English translator since the 1970s. He has translated eight of his novels and worked as a consultant on Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Silence. I asked him about the previously untranslated Endō story in Image issue 92, and about what Endō’s work has to say to the West. Image:…

I used to find Easter a letdown. Lent is so full of the self-improvement activities of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. I typically add a midday prayer to my usual Morning and Evening Prayer. I decide what organizations I want to give alms to: a different one each week of Lent. And fasting: not from food…