Issue 73

Called crimson, called vermilion—“little worm” in both the Persian and the Latin, red eggs for the carmine dye, the insect’s brood crushed stillborn from her dried body, aswarm in a bath of oak ash lye and alum to form the pigment the Germans called Saint John’s blood— the saint who picked brittle locusts for food,…

Not green as new weeds or crushed juniper, but a toxic and unearthly green, meet for inking angel wings, made from copper sheets treated with vapors of wine or vinegar, left to oxidize for the calligrapher. When it’s done, he’ll cover calfskin with a fleet of knotted beasts in caustic green that eats the page…

Betsy Sholl’s poem “The Harrowing” is published in Image issue 73. This web-exclusive interview with Sholl features questions from readers of Image.    How do you connect with secular readers? Part of me wonders if, when it comes to art, these distinctions between secular and sacred really apply. A poet has to write from a point…

The Portal of Beauty: Toward a Theology of Aesthetics By Bruno Forte Eerdmans, 2008 Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenges of Art By T.J. Gorringe Yale, 2011 Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination By Malcolm Guite Ashgate, 2010 Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality By Belden C. Lane Oxford,…

I’VE NEVER GIVEN myself an enema in front of anyone,” Christy says. We have arrived at a new stage in our friendship. And technically she’s not giving herself an enema in front of me. She readies what looks like a baster for a small turkey, and then I sit in the anteroom, next to the…

I HAVE TRIED  to learn the language of Christianity but often feel that I have made no progress at all. I don’t mean that Christianity doesn’t seem to “work” for me, as if its veracity were measured by its specific utility in my own life. I understand that my understanding must be forged and reformed within…

Migrant Farm Workers, a Medieval Mystery Play, and the Future of Religious Art in America   ON A CLEAR, COLD DECEMBER evening a few weeks before last Christmas I sat in a 215-year-old adobe church and listened to the devil preach the gospel. The devil, or Luzbel as he was named in the play I…

I suppose if the main challenge I set myself is to make increasingly beautiful work, the simpler the image the better, the more ideas the better, so the other variable is to make those images out of more and more insignificant material: a splash of dried seawater, a rusting can bottom, a handful of sand,…

Dana Gioia—poet, critic, and arts leader—has sometimes said, “I’m the only person who ever went to Stanford Business School to become a poet.” A native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent, he studied at Stanford (BA, MBA) and Harvard universities (MA), worked as VP of marketing for General Foods, and has published four poetry collections…

The day Christ died a record-long freight train barreled through the Rollins Road crossing. For seven minutes tankers and lumber flats vibrated through the spikes in his wrists. A fisherman dropped his pole by the retention pond and headed toward the hill. A girl at a bus stop clutched her side as the embryo implanted…