ImageUpdate’s Top Ten of 2016

Last updated on: December 27, 2016 at 8:17 pm By Image

Every week, the Image staff curates a digital dispatch of compelling new books, music, artwork, and more, with personal recommendations, links from around the web, and a community message board with calls for art and job postings (not to mention exclusive access to Image discounts and VIP workshop registration!). We deliver these dispatches from the world of art and faith entirely free of charge. We call it: ImageUpdate. And at the end of every year, we review the 100+ books, albums,... Read more

A Love Supreme: The Surprising Art of Sedrick Huckaby

Last updated on: December 26, 2016 at 1:50 am By Guest Contributor

This essay is a web exclusive accompanying Image journal’s current issue, #90. By Bruce Herman Homely, decorative, domestic—that’s how most of us think of quilting: something a sweet grandmother does while humming an old tune and waiting for a pie to cool on the rack. It’s a comfy-seeming practice we associate with homemaking and mothering—vocations mostly overlooked and never accorded the worldly esteem we give to the artist, composer, intellectual, or CEO. But of course we all know that it... Read more

Poetry Friday: “Carol of the Infuriated Hour”

Last updated on: December 12, 2016 at 5:40 pm By Image

Christmas carols: we love their joyous celebration of the birth of Christ. In “Carol of the Infuriated Hour,” David Brendan Hopes takes the carol form—its rhythm and rhyme scheme—to present a more complex view of the Christmas event. The poem’s speaker has “warred” with God, but he decides to cease his struggle “for the sake of this season in the stories.” The stories are the traditional ones of “talking beasts” and the “Christmas rose” and “the white stag in the... Read more

Gird Yourselves, Yet Be Shattered

Last updated on: December 22, 2016 at 3:26 am By Natalie Vestin

Of Lanecia A. Rouse Tinsley’s small encaustic Advent paintings, my favorite is Meditation on the Incarnation. If food can have mouthfeel, then art has gutfeel. Meditation on the Incarnation drops and spreads into the gut holy and creepy like tequila, like subzero air that both hardens and hurts the belly. Three blue, elongated forms more shadow or specter than human, stretch from top to bottom of the canvas’s center, a red dot like a pomegranate seed midway down the third... Read more

On the Front Lines

Last updated on: December 21, 2016 at 1:08 am By Guest Contributor

By Paul Anderson Seven months ago, I was teaching writing to high school seniors at a Christian school on the southwest side of Chicago, thirty minutes from my suburban hometown but essentially in another universe. I was three months away from finishing my MFA through Seattle Pacific University, and I wasn’t sure that I was going to make it—make it to the end of the MFA without succumbing to a mental collapse, or to the end of the teaching year... Read more

Kathleen Wakefield’s Invisible Stenographer

Last updated on: December 20, 2016 at 1:50 am By Peggy Rosenthal

You’ve got to meet this character. She’s a stenographer by trade: From the outset she was the obsessive type, maker of lists: dates, births and deaths, diagnoses, times of arrival and departure, the amassing of coins, weapons and works of art, portions of letters, speeches and grocery lists, though soon it was statements of motivation, speculations on the nature of the original crime, the 33 million names for God. She goes easily, as here, from the mundane specific (“grocery lists”)... Read more

I Miss Gwen Ifill

Last updated on: December 21, 2016 at 2:33 pm By Caroline Langston

For Kate Keplinger It is the blight man was born for It is Margaret that you mourn for… –“Spring and Fall,” Gerard Manley Hopkins “I’m sorry for your loss,” my friend Dionne posted in response to a note I posted on Facebook. I’d just come back on the redeye from the West Coast that morning, and stayed home from work to catch up on some sleep. I was puttering around in the kitchen in my nightgown, my mind in a... Read more

Poetry Friday: “A Christmas Story”

Last updated on: December 16, 2016 at 11:17 am By Image

In “A Christmas Story,” Robert Cording evokes Aleksander Wat (1900-1967), a Polish poet that converted from Judaism to Christianity while imprisoned in the Soviet Union. During a brief moment out of prison walls, the poem explains that Wat was awestruck by a simple street scene: a beautiful women in a green dress, the “bell of a bicycle,” blue sky. “It was all thrilling, achingly alive, a feast/ happening right there on the street between / the prison and the government... Read more

A Conversation with Scott Derrickson, Part 2

Last updated on: December 14, 2016 at 8:22 pm By Guest Contributor

Continued from yesterday. Scott Derrickson is a director whose films include The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister, and Deliver Us From Evil. His most recent film, Marvel’s Doctor Strange, is in theaters now. I had the chance to chat with Scott for Christianity Today in the summer of 2014, when news had just broke that he was Marvel’s choice. In this conversation, he was even more generous with his time and engaging in conversation as I found him to be two years... Read more

A Conversation with Scott Derrickson, Part 1

Last updated on: December 15, 2016 at 6:44 pm By Guest Contributor

Interviewed by Nick Olson Scott Derrickson is a director whose films include The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister, and Deliver Us From Evil. His most recent film, Marvel’s Doctor Strange, is in theaters now. I had the chance to chat with Scott for Christianity Today in the summer of 2014, when news had just broke that he was Marvel’s choice. In this conversation, he was even more generous with his time and as engaging in conversation as I found him to be two... Read more