The Poetics of Painting

Last updated on: January 14, 2013 at 1:05 am By Guest Contributor

Part Four: Tradition Guest Post By Daniel Siedell Today’s post concludes our occasional series on “The Poetics of Painting.” While touring an exhibition of Frank Stella’s paintings in 1970, critic Rosalind Krauss asked the exhibition’s organizer, fellow critic Michael Fried, why Stella, a Minimalist, felt compelled to paint stripes, again and again. Fried responded with this story: When Stella was a student at Princeton, he would take the train into Manhattan and go to the Met where he would sit... Read more

Whispers of Faith in a Postmodern World

Last updated on: January 11, 2013 at 8:02 pm By Gregory Wolfe

The Wall Street Journal featured this article by Image founder and editor Gregory Wolfe on Friday, January 11, 2013: Among our national pastimes, there is none more persistent than the ritual lament over the decline and fall of the arts. The death of the novel . . . the end of painting . . . if an art form exists, we’re willing to believe it has seen better days. Religious believers are equally prone to this sort of thing, and they... Read more

Weakness is Truth

Last updated on: July 18, 2013 at 12:26 pm By Jessica Eddings-Roeser

A couple of weeks ago in the gym locker room I averted my eyes as a young woman aided her grandmother, a stroke victim. She removed the older woman’s clothes and underwear, and helped her put on a swimsuit. The grandmother could not speak; her face remained still. She had to be lifted, naked, from a wheelchair, to a chair, and then back during the entire change of clothes. After settling the elderly woman, the granddaughter disappeared momentarily, and I... Read more

Clinging to Christmas

Last updated on: January 8, 2013 at 5:56 pm By Tony Woodlief

I cling to Christmas. I’d like to say that I have some tradition to which I hew—celebrating exactly twelve days of Christmas, say, or keeping my garland nailed up until the end of whatever date anthropologists think marks the end of the pagan winter solstice. I used to aspire to traditions, now I aspire to survival. So cling is the right word. I grab hold after Thanksgiving, as soon as I can slow the carousel of work and life. I... Read more

Soul Friends

Last updated on: July 18, 2013 at 12:12 pm By Peggy Rosenthal

“One’s ‘spiritual life’ isn’t apart from the rest of one’s life, something that goes on in the prayer room alone, but it is our life. Life is spiritual.” My spiritual director, the Merton scholar Fr. William Shannon, said this to me during one of our meetings—after I’d been seeing him for about a year. That was in 1986. He died last spring, at the age of ninety-four. Since then I’ve been slowly reading through the journal entries that I wrote... Read more

Traditional New Year’s Food

Last updated on: July 18, 2013 at 12:00 pm By Dyana Herron

At the end of December I talked to a friend of mine who lives in Seattle. He was going to a New Year’s Eve dinner and was having trouble deciding what to contribute to the meal. “It’s strange,” he said, “that Americans don’t have any traditional New Year’s foods. We have Thanksgiving food, and Christmas, but not New Year’s.” What I found strange was that he’d grown up without a food tradition on this holiday, because my family always ate... Read more

The Anniversary of My Father’s Death

Last updated on: January 7, 2013 at 1:03 am By Caroline Langston

“After the first exile, there is no other.” —Rosellen Brown, The Autobiography of My Mother, 1976 The great wheel of the year has turned once more, and I find myself back at the beginning again. Not at the start of a brand new year, but rather, at the anniversary of my father’s death. I was eight years old when he died, on January 8, 1977, after six long months of decline from lung cancer. In the family’s last-minute midnight scramble... Read more

Reynolds Price and Me: The Tale of Two Rhodes Scholars

Last updated on: January 4, 2013 at 1:57 am By Guest Contributor

Part Two Guest Post By Casey N. Cep Continued from yesterday. Years passed and fewer and fewer folks compared me to Reynolds Price, but I found myself returning to his work in 2011, the year he died. Price passed in January and that summer I served as hospital chaplain. Within a week of starting at the hospital, I went looking for one of Price’s books. After A Palpable God, Price had mostly left religion alone, writing novels, stories, plays, and even... Read more

Reynolds Price and Me: The Tale of Two Rhodes Scholars

Last updated on: January 3, 2013 at 12:41 am By Guest Contributor

Part One Guest Post By Casey N. Cep Fifty years ago Reynolds Price slithered onto the American literary scene. “Just with his body and from inside like a snake,” Wesley Beavers drove his motorcycle and his girlfriend Rosacoke Mustian into the 189-word sentence that opens A Long and Happy Life. The title of Price’s first novel was prescient for an author whose career spanned five decades and left us with forty books of essays, plays, poetry, stories, and translations. Born... Read more

Twelve Days To Sit with the God-Made-Man

Last updated on: July 18, 2013 at 11:56 am By Lindsey Crittenden

As a child, I was somewhat confused by the partridge in the pear tree and by Advent calendars. I liked both—especially the calendars, with their stiff little paper tabs opening up to an image of a toy or a bird or a tree for each day—but I didn’t understand the numerology. Advent calendars were calendars, but they didn’t last the entire month. They ended at twenty-four, the payoff of the often-arch-shaped double door opening up to reveal a honey-tinted scene... Read more