I go on binges. For days, weeks, months—well, usually not months—but days and weeks anyhow, I get taken by something and it will be all that interests me for a while. I’ll plunge into Faulkner for a time, then breach, crest, and fall into Graham Greene. Things don’t stay all that highbrow, either; I’m as apt to watch Duck Dynasty marathons as I am to read books. Then again, I might forswear all such pursuits and go into serious training... Read more
The other day a Facebook friend linked to a blog post on fifteen ways to raise happier, more grateful children. Just that morning I’d been complaining about how ungrateful our kids are for all the comforts they have and all the sacrifices we make for them—all the writing and living my husband and I don’t do so they can have nutritious food and a good education and lots of playtime in the open air. And what thanks do we get?... Read more
“Poetry makes nothing happen,” W.H. Auden famously claimed—famously and perhaps disingenuously, for if nothing else poetry makes people poets. In the fall of 1991, in my junior year at Stanford, I happened to see a flyer on campus for a reading by Philip Levine. My only brush with poetry before college had been the ill-fated impetus to answer an essay question on my application for early acceptance to Harvard with rhyming couplets. “Needless to say, that hopeless bard / never... Read more
To celebrate Image’s twenty-fifth anniversary we are posting a series of essays from people who have encountered our programs over the years. Read the other installments, Stumbling into the Waterfall and The Notecards of Paradise. Guest post By Dan Wakefield I was happy to be asked to speak at the first Image conference in Berkeley in 1992 and delighted to learn that Henri Nouwen, the Roman Catholic priest and Dutch theologian, would be there to deliver the Sunday homily. My minister at King’s Chapel in Boston... Read more
My friend Cindy’s memorial service was at the Quaker Meeting she’d attended for years. The program we were handed on entering had a photo of her on the front, and inside said simply: In the tradition of the Religious Society of Friends, this memorial service is held as a silent Meeting for Worship in which we remember our dear Friend and celebrate her life and gifts she brought to us. Friends hold that there is that of God within each... Read more
Guest post By Jeremy Begbie In yesterday’s post I had to skip over a lot of detail and nuance, but only to make what I hope is a fair point: that behind much of the polemics of the evolutionism controversy lies an imagination that has got out of hand. The problem is not with the imaginative drive to find and construct patterns, which help us make sense of things, or the fact it often works with metaphors. The difficulties start... Read more
Guest post By Jeremy Begbie Much is said these days about the importance of the imagination for virtually every human activity, from mowing a lawn to composing songs. And when it comes to the creationist-evolutionist disputes, it won’t be long before one side accuses the other of lacking imagination. Usually it’s the evolutionist who blames the Bible-reading creationist for a plodding literalism. And this is just where the arts are needed, so it is said, because they help us take... Read more
Dear Steve, I’ve had to look away for most of three decades now—away from your work. “Why.” That’s the title of a poem, a poem in your book Here and Now, I read this morning. “Because you can be sure a part of yourself is always missing,” the poem begins. When I read your poems now, like when I read them regularly decades ago, when, for a brief time, I was your student, your friend, I discover a part of... Read more
When Marie-Henri Beyle visited Florence, that city named for its place among waters, he thought the art he came across might kill him. Visiting the Basilica Santa Croce in 1817, he wrote that he “was seized with a fierce palpitation of the heart…the wellspring of life was dried up within me. I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground.” When I first heard of what is now called Stendhal’s syndrome (Beyle’s penname was Stendhal), I was overcome myself,... Read more
When I was a schoolboy, I used to plan for the world’s end. What would we need to survive? Where would we keep it? How would we defend it from the inevitable roving bands of marauders, who—if movies were any guide—would possess impressive organizational discipline, yet no ability to create anything but weapons? My side, which included my smart-but-bullied friends and me, would be prepared. We made lists. We drew pictures of supply depots. We diagrammed useful contraptions. The world... Read more
Good Letters
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In