Muddy River

Last updated on: May 9, 2017 at 12:18 pm By Guest Contributor

By Jen Pollock Michel. It was the summer of Leiby Kletzy, the eight-year-old Hasidic boy kidnapped from his Brooklyn neighborhood in broad daylight and brutally murdered. It was also the summer I almost lost my seven-year-old daughter Camille on a Toronto subway platform. When I turned, from inside the train, to see my daughter—outside, standing alone—my feet became bricks of indecision. The doors chimed and began closing. A stranger jumped to pry them open, and I pulled her inside, smothering... Read more

The Beauty Dialogues, Part 4

Last updated on: March 29, 2017 at 9:55 am By Gregory Wolfe

The following is a response to Morgan Meis’s letter posted yesterday. Dear Morgan: I’m enjoying this conversation but at times I worry that you’re playing Glaucon to my Socrates. In other words, just egging the “master” on. I want to be sure you’re not just tossing up softballs for me to take a swing at. You’re a professionally trained philosopher; I’ve never taken a philosophy class in my life. So don’t hesitate to take a real swing…at me! Now I... Read more

The Beauty Dialogues, Part 3

Last updated on: March 29, 2017 at 9:55 am By Morgan Meis

Today Morgan Meis continues his periodic exchanges with Image founder Gregory Wolfe. Dear Greg, Thanks for your response to my latest “challenge,” as you put it, on the question of beauty. I love all the things you have to say and find myself both moved and convinced by the nuanced, complicated version of beauty you’ve put forward. Or I should say…almost convinced. Alas, there are still a couple of sticking points for me. But what did you expect? I’m extremely... Read more

God’s Acquaintances

Last updated on: March 29, 2017 at 9:16 am By A. G. Harmon

They say God won’t let you go under; but it seems he will let your hair get pretty wet. Most trials, if they’re worthy of the name, don’t let you get away without a good scare, maybe even a rent garment and some scratches, if not scars. The less lucky might have to surrender more. Cries for help may be answered, but instantaneous, immediate resolution is admittedly rare. I think most would concede that. The difference in people is how... Read more

Poetry Friday: “Exile with Fox” by Chelsea Wagenaar

Last updated on: March 30, 2017 at 8:25 pm By Image

This poem draws me in with its opening sounds: “Midnight, mid-May.” With those urgent, humming Ms, we are situated in a lush environment thick with potential, growth, and energy. Midnight is a hidden time, an hour when reader and speaker should be asleep. Instead, in this poem we stand alert to a late spring night printed everywhere with presence: fecund plants, scattered proof of providential showers. I love how every word is working to voice that heightened attention. When the... Read more

Share If You Agree

Last updated on: March 28, 2017 at 11:47 am By Caroline Langston

I have had it with the rage. It might drive me off social media. At first, I thought it might just be a problem of living in metropolitan Washington, D.C., where the strident opinions held by many are usually interlinked with what they do for a living. No such luck, though: I’ve been on trips to Mississippi, California, and Texas in the past couple of years, and it has been just as bad there, too. This social pose has driven... Read more

My Bad Italy Novel

Last updated on: March 28, 2017 at 11:47 am By Guest Contributor

February is offseason in Rome, so today the city is a little gray, a little quiet, if ever it could be such a thing. I’m standing on the steps of San Luigi Dei Francesi church, buzzing a little from a sugary espresso. I’m gearing up to enter the church and see, for the fourth time in my life, one of the most gorgeous triptychs ever painted: Caravaggio’s Life of St. Matthew, comprised of The Calling, The Inspiration, and The Martyrdom... Read more

Mysteries Sherlock Holmes Can’t Solve

Last updated on: March 27, 2017 at 7:47 pm By Brad Fruhauff

“No, you should definitely major in English,” I told our babysitter, a high-school senior from our church who is considering an English or Communications degree. “Fiction is just like faith,” I said, “it’s its own kind of knowledge that makes our lives richer.” I really believe that, though I have to renew my conviction from time to time. I also believe faith is a kind of fiction. The kind that apprehends necessary truths. Not the truths we call science or... Read more

Heisenberg and the A-Bomb: Just Say No

Last updated on: March 20, 2017 at 9:14 pm By Peggy Rosenthal

I read through the article breathlessly, astonished at the moral implications of what I was learning. When I got to the end, I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, trying to begin to take in the import of what I’d just read. The article was “The Private Heisenberg and the Absent Bomb,” by Thomas Powers, in the December 22, 2016 issue of The New York Review of Books. I’d been drawn to the article because, during the 1980s, I’d studied... Read more

Poetry Friday: “Love’s Last” by Christian Wiman

Last updated on: March 23, 2017 at 11:47 pm By Image

The spring equinox was on Monday. I am slowly seeing a flush of new life around me, like plum tree blossoms and nettles, while winter’s dank decay is still lamentably present. Christian Wiman’s haunting and tender poem “Love’s Last” from his collection Once in the West (originally published in Image issue 81) echoes loudly for me right now during this transition of seasons. Within his austere couplets, Wiman ponders the passage of time and recalls memories from his youth. The... Read more