Skip to content

Log Out

×

Rebuilding the Cathedral

By Elizabeth DouglasOctober 7, 2019

  A few years ago, I spent nearly every spring morning with my young daughter in the tiny playground behind Notre Dame Cathedral. It was a great place to take a break. There were comfy benches and shade trees and clean bathrooms with an attendant.   Often, we’d find ourselves back in the center of town…

Read More

Hummingbird: For Rachel Held Evans

By D.L. MayfieldMay 9, 2019

A few weeks ago I saw a hummingbird on my back porch for the first time. It hovered in front of me, just a few feet from my face, as if it desperately wanted to be noticed. I get it, I said aloud. And then I gasped, because it really was so beautiful, shiny and…

Read More

Poetry Friday: “Lord of the hopeless also dear”

By Shane McCraeApril 19, 2019

Lord of the hopeless also dear     Hat-Soak Pole-in-the-Canal and Red-Tie Father     Son And Holy Ghost not     in that order break The rottenness of those who torture one Of Thy least wrath-deserving exiles me Not     wholly undeserving     no     but some And isn’t it the some that counts with Thee O     Gondola also as the trees pass…

Read More

Rafael Campo: Poetry as Healing, Illness as Muse

By Peggy RosenthalFebruary 27, 2019

What I would like to give them for a change is not the usual prescription with its hubris of the power to restore, to cure… So begins one of my favorite of Rafael Campo’s poems, “What I Would Give,” from his 2002 collection Landscape with Human Figure. Right from the start, the poem enacts Campo’s…

Read More

The Vision Will Not Disappoint

By Renée Darline RodenAugust 23, 2018

It is a miracle that we do not love; love is the watermark in the parchment of our existence. It is to love’s melody that our limbs respond. Whoever loves is obeying the impulse of life in time; whoever refuses to love is struggling (uselessly) against the current. —Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the…

Read More

Halted by Haiku

By Tania RunyanMay 8, 2018

The last thing the world needs is another post about “living in the moment,” but I just spent a month failing at haiku and can’t help but speak about what I have seen and heard. I’ve been engaging with form this year, so far writing a whole slew of sestinas, villanelles, and most recently, haiku—by…

Read More

Do I Have Anything Left to Say?

By Bryan BlissApril 26, 2018

When the email came in from my editor, I wasn’t sure how to answer. What do you want to do next? After years—a decade, really—of what felt like pushing a boulder up a mountain, sitting down every night to write no matter if my family was watching a movie or there was ice cream being…

Read More

Poetry Friday: “The Years Were Patient with Me”

By Jeanne Murray WalkerApril 20, 2018

I love this poem because it mirrors the passing of time, patiently guiding readers through the speaker’s perspectives on truth. The structure of the poem resembles a list, providing four metaphors for how truth moves in the world. The poem’s relationship with truth is a relationship characterized by time and movement. Even before we reach…

Read More

Poetry Friday: “The Preacher Addresses the Seminarians”

By Christian WimanFebruary 23, 2018

I once met a beer-guzzling goat like the one in Wiman’s poem. His name was Clay Henry, and he was elected the honorary mayor of Lajitas, Texas in 1986. But my deeper resonance with “The Preacher Addresses the Seminarians” lies in my identity as a seminary dropout who backdoored his way into the preaching life.…

Read More

The Optics of Illusion

By Brad FruhauffNovember 29, 2017

Ross told the kids to stare at the splotchy red and blue picture and wait. A dozen elementary-school students tried to sit still long enough to just look. The image could have been a representation of Claude Monet’s last sight of his breakfast nook. Color without definition, intensity without concreteness, depth without distance. For some…

Read More

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

* indicates required