Autistic Lives Matter

Last updated on: January 6, 2016 at 5:43 pm By Tania Runyan

When I first met Daniel Bowman Jr. at the Festival of Faith and Writing, we both experienced that you’re-not-how-I-pictured-you-from-Facebook moment. While he may not have felt self-consciously compact, I became quite aware of my own awkward, lumbering stature that banged into a book table or two. Still, I tried to make a good impression while obsessing over the fact that I wasn’t wearing earrings twenty minutes before my appointment to read a poem at the chapel. “I’ll feel naked up... Read more

A Metaphorical God, Part 2

Last updated on: January 6, 2016 at 5:43 pm By Gregory Wolfe

Continued from yesterday. In some ways, “mystery” is perhaps the boldest term we chose as a subtitle for Image, the one most out of touch with our times. It is true that secular artists and writers regularly speak of navigating uncertainties and ambiguities. But in their embrace of post-Enlightenment thought, they tacitly accept various determinisms that attempt to explain reality with reference to biology, psychology, sociology, or any of the modernist replacements for ultimate reality. Most secular writers and artists... Read more

A Metaphorical God, Part 1

Last updated on: January 6, 2016 at 5:42 pm By Gregory Wolfe

The following is adapted from the preface to The Operation of Grace: Further Essays on Art, Faith, and Mystery. My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest? but thou art also…a figurative, a metaphorical God too; a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch... Read more

To Illuminate a Small Field: 15 Songs for 2015

Last updated on: January 6, 2016 at 5:42 pm By Guest Contributor

By Joel Heng Hartse At the end of each year, I compile a list of “songs of the year” that I email to my friends (and send to Image) on December 31. These songs are probably not the best of the year, but I don’t know how I would be able to figure those out anyway (Jessica Hopper has a piece on this in her 2015 book The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic). Instead, these... Read more

Scoliosis and the Statue of St. Francis

Last updated on: May 12, 2016 at 1:10 pm By Christiana N. Peterson

During a windstorm, our wooden statue of St. Francis is knocked over. I lean him back onto the uneven garden patch beside the porch but the next morning, as I am ushering my children out the door for school, I hear my daughter cry, “Oh no, St. Francis has fallen!” I get them in the car, and even though we are close to being late, I run back to the door to pick him up and set him aright. Something... Read more

God is Sacrificial Love

Last updated on: December 29, 2015 at 2:07 am By A. G. Harmon

If God is love, as we’re told, then what kind of love is he? In the quest to know that which is beyond all knowing—another one of those oxymorons so characteristic of religion—we find a set of pictures that for any serious adult proves ultimately unsatisfying. Brotherly love, fatherly love, even passionate love have all been employed to express God’s essence through platitudes and poetry, paintings and precepts. God with his hand on our shoulders; God carrying us in his... Read more

Precious Things Come from Staying

Last updated on: May 12, 2016 at 1:12 pm By Guest Contributor

Joan Didion’s family, she says, are a tribe of leavers. In her 2004 book Where I Was From, she begins with her great-great-great-great-grandmother and traces a family history lined with people who, she says, are always leaving, always pushing west. “They tended to accommodate any means in pursuit of an uncertain end,” she says, unsparingly. “They tended to avoid dwelling on just what that end might imply. When they could not think what else to do they moved another thousand... Read more

Snow on Snow

Last updated on: December 25, 2015 at 12:12 am By Guest Contributor

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak mid-winter Long ago. You probably know these lines, either from Christina Rossetti’s poem of 1871 or, more likely, Holst’s setting of them as a carol. I know them. I used one of them as title of a book, “bleak” altered to “deep” by the publisher, who thought the former too gloomy. Which it might indeed be. Rossetti was melancholic, iced-up with unversed emotion; with passions gone gelid which,... Read more

Repression, Oppression, Suppression: A Life of Domestic Routine

Last updated on: December 22, 2015 at 12:31 am By Morgan Meis

Somewhere in the middle of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the eponymous Jeanne eats a sandwich in her kitchen. We have, by that point in the film, seen quite a lot of Jeanne’s kitchen. We’ve watched Ms. Dielman cook in that kitchen, peel potatoes, wash dishes (shot from behind her back so we can’t really see what she is doing), dry forks and knives, and polish her son’s shoes. By the second hour of the film (just... Read more

Prayer: When You Can’t Find the Words, Make Them Up

Last updated on: May 12, 2016 at 1:13 pm By Natalie Vestin

I spent much of this past summer watching my friend’s three-year-old girl, Mia, as my friend prepared for the birth of her son. I’d met Mia last year in Boston before her family had all moved back home to Beijing. Now, Mia was in Minnesota, living in an old Saint Paul house where she could watch birds and bunnies from the porch. The first time I visited, Mia yelled at me and her mom because we were speaking English and... Read more