Issue 64

In Image issue 64, theologian Jeremy Begbie reviews books by James Elkins and Daniel Siedell on the often-uneasy relationship between religion and contemporary art. We asked him about his emphasis on church tradition, and why deep commitment always beats neutrality.   Image: In the current issue of Image you review two books on the visual…

Believing Again: Doubt and Faith in a Secular Age by Roger Lundin   THOUGH BURIED in an avalanche, Brand continues to be buried by epitaphs. He is the pale, intense, somber priest of Henrik Ibsen’s dramatic poem about possessing “a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge” (Romans 10:2). Few characters from nineteenth-century literature…

On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art by James Elkins God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art by Daniel Siedell   FOR MANY OF US, the world of contemporary visual fine art is a strange place—not only in the sense that it can seem odd, but also in that it…

I TELL MY mother lies. Sometimes three or four times a day. I lie mostly about money. That I’ve sent it or that I’m just about to send it. Or that surely I will send it tomorrow. My mother waits for money like the bums waited for Godot. One day she called seventeen times. So…

I HAVE A BLACK AND WHITE photograph taken in 1967 that I found among my grandmother’s things after she died. In the foreground, my grandmother sits on a blanket, smiling self-consciously for the camera. To her left my brother stands in a seven-year-old boy’s macho pose with hands on hips, his smooth, hairless chest thrust…

WHEN MEASURING an artist’s greatness within a particular tradition, the essential criterion is not what that artist takes from the tradition but what he or she adds to it. For almost half a century, Gerhard Richter has applied his creative aptitude and technical facility to a critical investigation of the viability of a genuinely contemporary…

In 2007, Dan Chiasson wrote in the New Yorker that Australian poet Les Murray is “now routinely mentioned among the three or four leading English-language poets.” His awards include the Grace Leven Prize, the Kenneth Slessor Prize, the Petrarch Prize, and the prestigious T.S. Eliot Award. In 1999 he was awarded the Queens Gold Medal…

You lie like a comma in the sentence of your bed. Your legs stack like planks; each hand steadies the opposite shoulder. It’s a position you assume when assailed by dreams or sleepless longing, or on nights you feel you’re breathing broken glass. Tonight you buckle into yourself and mourn two vocabularies, a moldy discourse…

Someone removes the horses and unicorns and stations the carousel in a hotel lobby. Barstools mark the wheel’s perimeter so you can still go for a ride, watching the room orbit slowly around you and the other raw languid girls likewise drinking martinis on a Thursday afternoon. It takes less time to finish a drink…