Editorial Statement

Brian Volck, No Better Place to End

Fiction

Graham Hillard, Pavane for a Dead Princess
John F. Deane, Give Dust a Tongue

Poetry

Pattiann Rogers, The Moss Method
Fire in Freedom
Manifest, by Reason of Birth

Margaret Gibson, Evolution
Middle Distance, Morning
How Long the Long Winter

Katy Didden, And I Will Look for You in Fields of Poppies

Carrie Fountain, June
Poem in July
Christmas Morning in a Hotel Room

Jeanne Murray Walker, In the Beginning Was the Word
The Music before the Music
Return to the Beginning

John Terpstra, Orange and Spices

Judith Kunst, Prodigal Body

Kathleen L. Housley, The Microbiome and the Boson
Infantile Paralysis
Elegy for a Microbe Hunter

Daniel Tobin, In the Beginning

Richard Chess, When God Dreamed Eve through Adam

Visual Arts

Mark Sprinkle, Ecologies of Knowing: What Natalie Settles Learned in the Lab
Read our web-exclusive interview with Natalie Settles here.

Interview

Kathleen L. Housley, A Conversation with Jeremy Begbie

Symposium

Reading from Two Books: Nature, Scripture, and Evolution

Lynda Sexson
Calvin B. DeWitt
Camellia Freeman
Scott Russell Sanders
Fred Bahnson
Natalie Vestin
Toby Twining
Isaac Anderson
Susanne Paola Antonetta

Confessions

Ryan Flanagan, Where Are You?

Book Review

Morgan Meis, Loren Eiseley’s Darwin’s Century
John F. Haught’s Science and Faith
Elizabeth A. Johnson’s Ask the Beasts
Philip Kitcher’s Living with Darwin

Richard Chess is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Third Temple (Tampa). He is a regular contributor to Image’s blog, Good Letters. At UNC Asheville, he directs the Center for Jewish Studies and serves as the Roy Carroll Professor of Honors Arts and Sciences. He is active in the movement to integrate contemplative practices into higher education and has participated in the Jewish Mindfulness Teacher Training Program.

John F. Deane was born on Achill Island in 1943. In 1979 he founded Poetry Ireland and the Poetry Ireland Review, which he currently edits. He has published several collections of poetry, including Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill: New & Selected Poems and Semibreve (both from Carcanet).

Katy Didden is the author of The Glacier’s Wake (Pleiades). A recent Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, she will join the creative writing faculty at Ball State University next fall. 

Ryan Flanagan grew up in Turnersville, New Jersey, and is currently a Toulouse Dissertation Fellow at the University of North Texas. His nonfiction has appeared in CutBank and Diagram. 

Carrie Fountain’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Tin House. She is the author of two poetry collections, Instant Winner and Burn Lake (both from Penguin). The latter won a 2009 National Poetry Series Award. She is writer-in-residence at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas.

Margaret Gibson is the author of eleven books of poetry and one prose memoir, most recently Broken Cup and Second Nature (both from Louisiana State). Her awards include the Lamont Selection for Poetry, the Melville Kane Award, the Connecticut Book Award in Poetry, and two Pushcarts. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and is professor emerita of the University of Connecticut. 

Graham Hillard is the editor of the Cumberland River Review and an associate professor of English at Trevecca Nazarene University. He has contributed to The Believer, Notre Dame Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Oxford American, The Weekly Standard, and other magazines. He has been a resident fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a Tennessee Williams scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Kathleen L. Housley is the author of nine books, most recently the poetry collection Epiphanies (Wising Up) and The Sage of Time and Chance (Wipf & Stock), a novel based on Ecclesiastes. 

Judith Kunst is the author of The Burning Word: A Christian Encounter with Jewish Midrash (Paraclete). Her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Able Muse, Measure, Southern Poetry Review, and other publications, as well as through the Spark and Echo Arts project. She lives with her family at La Lumiere School in northwest Indiana.

Morgan Meis is critic-at-large for The Smart Set and an editor at 3 Quarks Daily. He has a PhD in philosophy from the New School for Social Research and is a 2013 Whiting Award winner. 

Pattiann Rogers has published fourteen books, most recently Holy Heathen Rhapsody (Penguin). She is the recipient of two NEA Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology, Best American Poetry, and Best Spiritual Writing. Her papers are archived in the Sowell Collection at Texas Tech University.

Mark Sprinkle is an artist, craftsman, writer, and curator. His PhD from the College of William and Mary focused on the phenomenology of art in domestic environments. He has served as senior fellow in arts and humanities at the BioLogos Foundation and now convenes conversations on art and faith from his home in Richmond, Virginia. www.marksprinkle.com.

John Terpstra is a poet whose most recent collection, Brilliant Falls, won the Hamilton Literary Award, and a nonfiction writer whose most recent work is The House with the Parapet Wall (both are from Gaspereau Press). He has been short-listed for both the Governor General’s Award and the Charles Taylor Prize and is, by trade, a furniture-maker.

Daniel Tobin is the author of seven books of poems, including Second Things, Belated Heavens (winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry), The Net, and the forthcoming From Nothing (all from Four Way); as well as the critical studies Passage to the Center (Kentucky) and Awake in America: On Irish-American Poetry (Notre Dame). His awards include fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Brian Volck is a pediatrician who received his MFA in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University. His first collection of poetry, Flesh Becomes Word (Dos Madres), was released in 2013. He is coauthor of Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Modern Medicine (Brazos). His essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in America, The Christian Century, DoubleTake, and Health Affairs.

Jeanne Murray Walker’s most recent books are Helping the Morning: New and Selected Poetry (Word Farm) and The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage through Alzheimer’s (Hachette). She is a professor of English at the University of Delaware and teaches in the Seattle Pacific University MFA Program. Her website is www.JeanneMurrayWalker.com.

Read our interview with Natalie Settles, only available online!

It is difficult to find a language in which faith and science can speak to each other. For some, faith and science are competing systems of thought, and an intellectually responsible person must make a choice between them, especially when it comes to questions about the origins and development of life. For others, faith and science each have a place, but can have nothing to say to each other because they operate in entirely separate spheres.

It is our hope that art, with its capacity for metaphor, can translate between these schools. With that in mind, we decided to devote most of an issue of Image to fiction, poetry, essays, and art that explore the intersection between faith and science, with special attention to evolution. Image issue 85 includes responses to this topic from Pattiann Rogers, Margaret Gibson, Calvin DeWitt, Natalie Settles, Lynda Sexson, Scott Russell Sanders, Jeanne Murray Walker, Jeremy Begbie, Daniel Tobin, Brian Volck, Morgan Meis, and many others.

Our two study guides, tailored to church small groups and the undergraduate classroom, are designed to engage readers more deeply in this special issue of Image. They include discussion questions, project ideas, and suggestions for further reading.

Download the guides here:
Issue 85 Study Guide for Churches
Issue 85 Study Guide for the Undergraduate Classroom

This project is underwritten by a grant from the BioLogos Foundation. The guides were authored by Natalie Vestin.