Editorial Statement

Gregory Wolfe, Slow Culture

Fiction

John Biguenet, Ex Cathedra
Christian Michener, Ordinary Ghosts

Poetry

Scott Cairns, And Yet another Page and Yet
Hesychasterion
Articulation

Eric Pankey, The Entry into Jerusalem
A Study for a Figure...

Susan L. Miller, Paradise 

Claire Bateman, The Perfectly Transparent Splinter

Megan Snyder-Camp, Guide to Avian Architecture
Hive Boxes

Ciaran Berry, How the Band Becomes One Body

Gina Franco, Foundations of a Marvelous Science

Michael Mott, Letter VII from the Western Coast...

Fleda Brown, Learning the Crawl
Houghton Lake

Visual Arts

Daniel A. Siedell, Where Do You Stand?
Anselm Kiefer’s Visual and Verbal Artifacts

Paula Huston, Attending to the Light:
The Landscapes of David Dewey

Interview

A Conversation with Dennis Covington

Essay

Peggy Rosenthal, An Apprenticeship in Affliction:
Waiting with Simone Weil

Fred Bahnson, The Underground Life of Prayer

Web Exclusive: An Interview with Fred Bahnson

Confessions

Susanne Antonetta, With Saint Christopher at Chimayo

Book Review

Katie Kresser, Alex Danchev’s, Cézanne: A Life
Johannes Grave’s, Caspar David Friedrich
Ross King’s, Leonardo and the Last Supper

Jo Anna Gaona Albiar teaches at Austin Community College and in the Upward Bound program through Southwestern University. She earned a BA from Baylor University, an MA from Texas Tech University, and an MFA from Seattle Pacific University.

Susanne Antonetta is the author of Body Toxic (Counterpoint), a New York Times Notable Book and American Book Award–winner, and A Mind Apart (Tarcher), winner of the NAMI/Ken Johnson Award. She has contributed to the New York Times, Washington Post, Orion, Seneca Review, and other publications. She lives in Bellingham, Washington.

Fred Bahnson directs the Food, Faith, and Religious Leadership Initiative at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. He is the author of the forthcoming Soil and Sacrament (Simon & Schuster) and co-author of Making Peace with the Land (InterVarsity). His essays have appeared in Oxford American, The Sun, Orion, Christian Science Monitor, Christian Century, and Best American Spiritual Writing. In 2012 he was the recipient of an artist fellowship from the North Carolina Arts Council. 

Claire Bateman’s books include Locals (Serving House), Friction (Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize), 
The Bicycle Slow Race (Wesleyan), Coronology (Etruscan), Clumsy, and Leap (both from New Issues). She has been awarded fellowships from the NEA, Tennessee Arts Commission, and Surdna Foundation, as well as two Pushcart Prizes. She is poetry editor of St. Katherine Review.

Ciaran Berry’s first book of poems, The Sphere of Birds, was published by Southern Illinois University Press in North America and by the Gallery Press in Ireland and the UK. Newer work has appeared in AGNI, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Poetry Ireland, Poetry London, and Threepenny Review. He teaches at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

John Biguenet has published seven books, including the novel Oyster and the story collection The Torturer’s Apprentice (both from Ecco/HarperCollins), and written such award-winning plays as The Vulgar Soul, Rising Water, Shotgun, Night Train, and Broomstick. An O. Henry Award–winner for short fiction, he is currently the Robert Hunter Distinguished University Professor at Loyola University.

Fleda Brown, former poet laureate of Delaware, won the Felix Pollak Prize for her newest collection of poems, Reunion (Wisconsin). Professor emerita at the University of Delaware, she has taught for twenty-seven years, for a time directing the Poets in the Schools program. She now teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington. Her recent book of personal essays is titled Driving with Dvorák (Nebraska).

Scott Cairns is professor of English at University of Missouri and director of MU Writing Workshops in Greece. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, and Prairie Schooner, and have been anthologized in Best American Spiritual Writing. Descent to the Heart (Paraclete), a new translation of excerpts from the Greek Philokalia, is forthcoming this year.

Gina Franco’s first collection of poems, The Keepsake Storm, was published by the University of Arizona Press Camino del Sol Latina/o Literary Series. Her work has appeared widely, including in Black Warrior Review, BorderSenses, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing. She was the 2006 recipient of the Bread Loaf Meralmikjen Fellowship in Poetry, and currently serves as acquiring art editor of Pilgrimage Magazine.

Paula Huston is the author of two novels, including the forthcoming A Land without Sin (Slant), plus six works of creative nonfiction. Her essays and short fiction have been honored by Best American Short Stories, Best Spiritual Writing, and the NEA. She currently teaches in Seattle Pacific University’s MFA program in creative writing.

Katie Kresser is an associate professor of art history at Seattle Pacific University. Her research interests include aesthetics, art theory, and American art at the turn of the twentieth century. She is the author of The Art and Thought of John La Farge: Picturing Authenticity in Gilded Age America (Ashgate) as well as numerous articles for publications including Image, Christian Scholar’s Review, and American Art, the journal of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Christian Michener’s short stories have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Harpur Palate, Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of a story collection, Numerology (New Rivers), as well as a critical study of novelist William Kennedy and a number of essays of literary criticism. “Ordinary Ghosts” is one of a series of stories about early twentieth-century Pittsburgh.

Susan L. Miller teaches poetry and expository writing at Rutgers University as a Russell Teaching Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Meridian, Commonweal, Sewanee Theological Review, Calyx, Iowa Review, and other journals, and in the anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion, and Spirituality. She has two poems forthcoming in The Lives We Seek (Ave Maria), and has twice received a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize for poetry.

Michael Mott has published four novels, an award-wining biography, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (Houghton Mifflin), and ten collections of poetry. The World of Richard Dadd (Margie) won the Robert E. Lee and Ruth I. Wilson Poetry Book Award.

Eric Pankey is the author of nine collections of poems, most recently Trace (Milkweed). He is Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University.

Peggy Rosenthal writes widely on poetry as a spiritual resource, including at Image’s blog, Good Letters. Her books include Praying through Poetry: Hope for Violent Times (Franciscan Media) and The Poets’ Jesus (Oxford). She teaches Image’s Glen Online course “Poetry as a Spiritual Practice.”

Daniel A. Siedell is an associate professor of Christianity and culture at Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Follow him on Twitter at @DanSiedell.

Megan Snyder-Camp’s first book of poems, The Forest of Sure Things, won the Tupelo Press/Crazyhorse Book Award. Recent work has been supported by a grant from the 4Culture Foundation, and recent poems have appeared in Southern Review and Poetry Northwest and on PBS NewsHour.

Acknowledgements

Anselm Kiefer is represented by Gagosian Gallery in New York (www.gagosian.com). All images are used by permission.

David Dewey is represented by Bernarducci Meisel Gallery in New York (www.bernarduccimeisel.com) and Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, Maine (www.caldbeck.com). All images are used by permission.

Read our interview with Fred Bahnson, only available online!