Skip to content

Log Out

×

How Do Words Become Flesh?

By Julia Walsh, FSPADecember 24, 2018

This womb of mine will not know the pangs of pregnancy. My skin will not tighten when another body becomes part of my flesh. My inner organs will not shift to make room; my ankles will not swell; my appetite will not increase because my body is making another person. This womb is empty, creased.…

Read More

Artists Show Us Jesus as Refugee and Refugees as Jesus

By Peggy RosenthalDecember 12, 2018

It has to be one of the most extraordinary Christmas trees ever imagined. Twelve feet high, glowing in brilliant oranges, this “tree” was created by artist Ben Quilty out of the lifejackets of Syrian refugee children who had safely reached the island of Lesbos on boats. For the current Christmas season, this sculpture has been…

Read More

The Christmas I Sat Next to a Sex Offender

By Jessica Eddings-RoeserDecember 25, 2017

Last year my husband and I celebrated our first Christmas with our infant daughter. She couldn’t understand the holiday, of course, but that didn’t stop us from discussing Advent calendars, wreaths, and Jesse Trees in depth, continuing a friendly argument about Santa Claus that has been going on since our engagement. Citing our childhood experiences…

Read More

Lucia in the Dark

By Natalie VestinDecember 13, 2017

Every year after the clocks fall back, I read Lia Purpura’s essay “Sugar Eggs: A Reverie” from her collection On Looking. In the essay, Purpura is concerned with the space created when one looks into another world: the panorama built inside a sugar egg, a snow globe, a “horse’s scummy water trough,” cells massing to…

Read More

Advent Lights

By Bryan BlissDecember 4, 2017

The highways that snake down and around rural Iowa are dark. Enough that, if you are driving at the right time of night, and there isn’t a lot of traffic, you can catch moments of brilliance in the sky. Stars forever. An impossibly deep night. The opportunity to take a breath. My wife and kids…

Read More

Poetry Friday: “Carol of the Infuriated Hour”

By David Brendan HopesDecember 23, 2016

Christmas carols: we love their joyous celebration of the birth of Christ. In “Carol of the Infuriated Hour,” David Brendan Hopes takes the carol form—its rhythm and rhyme scheme—to present a more complex view of the Christmas event. The poem’s speaker has “warred” with God, but  he decides to cease his struggle “for the sake…

Read More

Gird Yourselves, Yet Be Shattered

By Natalie VestinDecember 22, 2016

Of Lanecia A. Rouse Tinsley’s small encaustic Advent paintings, my favorite is Meditation on the Incarnation. If food can have mouthfeel, then art has gutfeel. Meditation on the Incarnation drops and spreads into the gut holy and creepy like tequila, like subzero air that both hardens and hurts the belly. Three blue, elongated forms more…

Read More

Poetry Friday: “A Christmas Story”

By Robert CordingDecember 16, 2016

In “A Christmas Story,” Robert Cording evokes Aleksander Wat (1900-1967), a Polish poet that converted from Judaism to Christianity while imprisoned in the Soviet Union. During a brief moment out of prison walls, the poem explains that Wat was awestruck by a simple street scene: a beautiful women in a green dress, the “bell of…

Read More

Snow on Snow

By Robert ClarkDecember 25, 2015

  Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak mid-winter Long ago. You probably know these lines, either from Christina Rossetti’s poem of 1871 or, more likely, Holst’s setting of them as a carol. I know them. I used one of them as title of a book, “bleak” altered to “deep”…

Read More

Come, Lord Jesus

By Peggy RosenthalDecember 21, 2015

I’ve always loved Advent’s “O” Antiphons. These are the prayers traditionally voiced during the final seven days of Advent, prior to singing the Magnificat at Evening Prayer. Each of these antiphons begins with “O” and is addressed to Christ under one of his names mentioned in the Bible. They are brief, one-sentence prayers of longing…

Read More

Receive ImageUpdate, our free weekly newsletter featuring the best from Image and the world of arts & faith

* indicates required