“The Kotzker Rebbe–” * Devotion to God. Devotion to Art. Immersion. Withdrawal. * Four paths: Into the world. Apart from the world. Through the world. Beyond the world.* I’ve heard of him: the Kotzker Rebbe. Haven’t I heard at least one of his teachings from any of a million rabbis from whom I’ve learned? Rebbe:…

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…

The following is a response to Morgan Meis’s letter posted yesterday. Dear Morgan: Thanks for throwing down this particular gauntlet. Yes, we adopted Dostoevsky’s phrase from The Idiot, where one of the characters attributes the saying “beauty will save the world” to the eponymous hero of the novel, Prince Myshkin. I’m well aware that any…

Jessica Goudeau’s translations of the work of Adélia Prado, Brazil’s foremost living poet, appear in issue 91.  The night I met Dona Adélia, she told me my husband was the perfect man. She came to the University of Texas for a poetry reading with her longtime translator and editor, Ellen Doré Watson. At almost eighty,…

Imagine an alternate history in which a regime arose in the United States that believed in power over equality, profit over values, the privilege of the few over the good of the many, and appearance over truth. Imagine these powers infiltrated the highest offices of our government, and that they began to institute anti-democratic policies,…

Dear readers, When Image was founded in 1989, we turned to a few literary exemplars for endorsements. After all, we had no reputation, money, or power, so we needed to find advocates whose words carried authority. One of the first we turned to was Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Dillard, whose incandescent prose dealt with some of…

I came to Christianity in my mid-twenties and joined a Protestant church whose denominational arm publishes devotional booklets that called to mind the copies of Watchtowers Jehovah’s Witnesses used to foist on me. As a new believer, I was supposed to develop a disciplined spiritual life, the cornerstone being morning devotions: Rise at dawn, open…

I have beauty on the mind. No doubt a result of my ongoing debate with Gregory Wolfe (running into its fourth iteration now). We’ve been chatting, lo these many weeks, about the relevance of the religious voice to contemporary debates on aesthetical matters. When you’re talking about aesthetics, the question of beauty tends to rear…

I’ve been engaged in an ongoing wrangle with Gregory Wolfe about the status of Christian intellectuals in the public sphere. We got a bit stuck on the question of T.S. Eliot and the worthiness of New Criticism. Mr. Wolfe has helped to un-stick the conversation with a rather devastating reply to my last post. Pointing…