If you want to be submerged in the depths of Jewish spirituality, this is the book to read: Love Nailed to the Doorpost, by Richard Chess. No, not “read”: at least not “read” in the way you would read an email or a newspaper or a novel. The poems and prose-poems collected in this book draw you beneath reading to a meditation, a pause, a reflection, another pause…. And not really “Jewish spirituality”: for Chess’s spirituality, while deeply Jewish, is more... Read more
I used to collect poems that are prayers, so Sharon Cumberland’s “Prayer” immediately leapt out at me from the pages if Image. Leapt out—but then instantly grabbed me uncomfortably in the opening line: “Ignore, O Mystery, this thing You made.” The speaker’s plea to God is not for connection but for separation. Why? Because, as the next lines explain, the speaker feels merely a “thing”—so utterly different from God that she fears even “to conjure You with prayer.” So this... Read more
It occurs to me each time I listen to Kendrick Lamar’s new album, Damn: The award winning and much celebrated rapper laments over and over that he feels like nobody’s praying for him. It’s his greatest fear. I’m not sure you can listen casually to a Lamar album. Each song demands attention to every word. Each song puts you on edge: Which of Lamar’s personas or characters will speak next? At the sound of Lamar’s anxious voice, we become anxious for some... Read more
Today philosopher Santiago Ramos steps in with the last word (we think) of “The Beauty Dialogues,” a periodic exchange between Image contributor Morgan Meis and Image founder Gregory Wolfe. For a while now I have borne the fearful hunch that sooner or later, Image would have to confront Immanuel Kant. A journal whose reason for existing rests on the idea that beauty is a source for personal redemption and cultural renewal—in other words, the idea that “beauty will save the world”—would have to eventually come to terms with the aesthetic theory... Read more
Yes even when I don’t believe there is a place in me inaccessible to unbelief a patch of wild grace —Anna Kamieńska If humans are the only intelligent life in the universe, should we feel sad about that? Should we feel bereft, or disappointed? That’s how David Kestenbaum describes his feelings on a recent This American Life. “This would mean,” he tells Ira Glass, “there’s nobody out there that knows more than we do…. Like, what we know is it. What we... Read more
The picture you see to the left is of a bookshelf in a local Starbucks. This is no regular Starbucks, but the fancy kind you find in big cities, where they have long bars at which people can sit upon artisan-crafted stools and have artisan-made coffee served to them in pottery out of Bunsen and beaker-type contraptions, likely forged by artisans. When did that word become such a big thing anyway? “Artisan”? It seems meant as one of those virtue-signaling... Read more
By Adam Tyler Horn When Dante finally sees Beatrice near the end of the Purgatorio, he quotes Virgil’s Aeneid in the presence of his guide, Virgil himself. “I know the signs of that ancient flame,” he exclaims, transforming Dido’s doomed hailing of Aeneas into a renewed celebration of Beatrice as Beatitude, as icon of God instead of fetishized lost love-object. But when he turns to look for Virgil, Virgil is gone. I remember reading the Purgatorio for the first time one summer at Jesus College,... Read more
Jasmine Temple, laboratory technician at New York University Lagone Medical Center, Institute for Systems Genetics, won this year’s agar art contest for her creation “Sunset at the End.” The contest, held every year by the American Society for Microbiology, features images of landscapes, portraits, and conceptual art made by the arrangement of microorganisms grown on agar plates. Temple’s image was unique not only because it was beautiful, but also because it showed the potential of transkingdom interactions—the exchange of genetic... Read more
When we bought our new house, a jungle of weeds marked the front yard. I was annoyed. The previous owners—moving out of the state—had obviously phoned in the upkeep in their last months of ownership and I wondered aloud what else they would abandon in their final nights. Would we come home to a clogged bathtub? A basement of mice? Our realtor laughed and assured me this was not, in fact, neglect but actually a “butterfly garden”—a bonus! When I... Read more
As I was saying my rosary this morning on my walk, it occurred to me to leave the beads on a fencepost along the road for someone. Read more
Good Letters
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