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Epic Quiet Tragedy

By Nausikaä El-MeckyMay 12, 2020

And then I wonder: is this the quiet that dominates the life of all those people in hiding as well? The smallness, the excessive focus on detail, the mind going around in ever smaller circles? Will deeper thoughts and grand narratives only make themselves heard after this is all over?

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Cutting Away the Noise

By Shannon Huffman PolsonJune 6, 2018

Fifteen years ago, there was no end to the noise. It took a cutting to get me to silence. I worked twelve-hour days and longer in an aircraft hangar on a flight line of hundreds of helicopters with the cacophony of auxiliary power units, the collision of metal, and rotor blades beating the air outside,…

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Writing the Land and Its Story: An Interview with Paul Kingsnorth, Part 1

By Ragan SutterfieldJune 4, 2018

“It’s the End of the World as We Know It…and He Feels Fine”—that’s how the New York Times Magazine titled a profile of the writer Paul Kingsnorth. Kingsnorth is an essayist and novelist, an Englishman who lives on a small homestead in Northern Ireland. With his deep concerns about what he called the “ecocide” of…

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Singing Silence in A Far Country Near

By Peggy RosenthalApril 10, 2018

“Without the traffic, silence / itself would sound red birdsong…” As I’m reading these lines in the poem “Seeing in Silence” in Murray Bodo’s latest volume, A Far Country Near: Poems New and Selected, I pause and ponder. How can silence “sound”? I could get literal and say that without traffic’s noise we can hear…

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Silent Mysteries

By Christopher PooreOctober 17, 2017

Lately, it seems, everyone is talking about silence—how they have less of it, how they wish they had more of it, how our Twittering lives have eaten away at some fundamental interior space that we didn’t even know was fragile to begin with. And the conversation about silence inspires its own cottage industry. You can…

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An All Too Ghostly Ghost Story: Part 1

By Nick OlsonAugust 28, 2017

If you want to be reminded of all that overwhelms you, go see David Lowery’s latest film A Ghost Story. I know that sounds like a good reason not to see a movie, but consider it a recommendation. To be human is to be any number of things; one such attribute is that near-cliché, haunted.…

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A Conversation with Van Gessel

By Mary Kenagy MitchellMay 25, 2017

Van Gessel has been Shūsaku Endō’s primary English translator since the 1970s. He has translated eight of his novels and worked as a consultant on Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Silence. I asked him about the previously untranslated Endō story in Image issue 92, and about what Endō’s work has to say to the West. Image:…

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The Sound of Scorsese’s Silence

By Nick OlsonMay 17, 2017

It’s been nearly a month since I finally saw Scorsese’s Silence, and what I remember most is the cry of cicadas and how crucial sound is to the film’s translation of Shūsaku Endō’s novel. The cicadas’ song is loud, and in Silence, they sound a sorrowful note. We hear the cicadas and the crickets before…

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Arts and Faith Top 10 Films of 2016: Part 2 

By the Arts & Faith Ecumenical Jury February 23, 2017

Though the year of 2016 was a weighty year for politics and world events, it was also a great year for movies. The Arts and Faith Ecumenical Jury of 2016 has compiled a list of ten excellent films we found to be especially noteworthy. This year’s thirteen jury members include professors and pastors, professional film…

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John Slater’s Lean

By Peggy RosenthalFebruary 1, 2017

What is poetry, anyway? I found myself musing about this as I sat with John Slater’s stimulating new collection, Lean. First I recalled what I’d once heard poet Li-Young Lee say at a reading: In poetry, language is not the only medium; silence is also a medium. This is a difference of poetry from prose.…

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