Your Support Matters

Image is both a quarterly journal and an integrated suite of programs, making it the leading organization promoting cultural renewal through a reawakening of the religious imagination.

Image would not exist were it not for volunteers willing to labor for it without pay and generous donors who keep Image alive with their financial gifts. Charitable contributions make up a third of our livelihood, allowing Image to produce the journal and other high-quality programs and extend their reach to others.

Your help will ensure that Image can respond to the increasing demand for our programs and remain at the forefront of cultural renewal in our time.

Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution today.

As a small, tightly run ship, every dollar you give makes a big difference, be it $35, $50, $100, $500, or more.

We ask that you read our annual appeal letter and consider whether you might join the ranks of our supporters. As the late spiritual writer Henri Nouwen once said, in a talk entitled “The Spirituality of Fundraising”: “Asking people for money is giving them the opportunity to put their resources at the disposal of the Kingdom.”

2007 Annual Appeal Letter

November 5, 2007

Dear Friend of Image:

A few years ago, an aspiring writer found herself struggling with a book project. As a person of faith, she began to wonder whether creative writing was a meaningful vocation, especially because the tale she wanted to tell was raw and powerful—and intended for a mainstream audience. In her own church community, there were few people she could talk to about the questions that weighed upon her.

But she was an avid Image subscriber and knew of our Glen Workshop program, so she registered for the fiction class. Like many other Glen attendees, she was apprehensive about sharing her work with others—and with the renowned fiction writer who led the workshop.

What she found was a great deal of love and support within a community of faith dedicated to excellence in the arts. And so she returned to the Glen, year after year, working away on that manuscript, until it was accepted for publication by a major trade publisher.

And just last month that book, Story of a Girl, was nominated for a National Book Award in Young People’s Literature.

Months before Sara Zarr’s book had been honored in this way, she wrote to us that the Glen “played no small part in my ability to keep forging ahead.... Not feeling alone and, more importantly, coming to understand divine endorsement of the creative process, has helped more than I can ever describe.”

Dramatic as Sara’s story might be, in its essential elements it has been the experience of hundreds and thousands of Image subscribers and Glen attendees over a span of nearly two decades now.

You are an integral part of that story—for which we are most grateful. Whether you are a maker or a lover of art, you are supporting the mission that has made a decisive difference for Sara Zarr and so many others.

As stories like Sara’s multiply and reverberate, and artists of faith feel emboldened to create honest, exceptional work, it amounts to real cultural change.

And people are noticing.

Take, for example, sociologist D. Michael Lindsay’s new book Faith in the Halls of Power (whose overblown title belies the nuanced thought inside). Lindsay’s comprehensive research suggests that believers who place themselves smack in the center of cultural life not only earn greater influence outside the church, but create better sustained, more vibrant, spiritual communities within it.

In other words, bringing faith into the common stream of culture—and allowing culture to enrich our faith in return—transforms everything.

Lindsay cites Image as an organization at the forefront of that transformation, crossing artificial boundaries to carry art that embodies a redemptive vision to believers and non-believers alike.

We see the results of that “boundary transgressing” more and more every year.

Just this year, material first published in Image appeared in Utne Reader, Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac radio show, the Poetry Daily website, the Wilson Quarterly, and the 2007 Best New Poets anthology.

The Glen Workshop, our summer program in Santa Fe, matched last year’s record-breaking attendance and drew the attention of the PBS program Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, which aired a segment on the Glen on public television this summer.

Image itself was honored with its third grant in a row from the National Endowment for the Arts, which designates important artistic resources for our national culture.

Image hosted its first-ever international seminar to Florence, Italy, where attendees explored the outpouring of art inspired by faith in the Renaissance—and asked how such a thing might happen again today. One attendee described the trip as “more than I hoped for. A deep-end plunge into issues of faith and culture I have watched from a distance.”

The Florence Seminar is just one example of how Image’s programs do more than draw national recognition—they change lives.

We hear the personal testimonies loud and clear. Some are from readers grateful to discover Image. One wrote us recently:

“I would like to let you know how thrilled I am to find an intelligent, beautiful journal about the arts and faith! As an artist and a grad student, so often I find that the ‘church’ is wary of me and the art world...ignores me and I struggle to find a place I can fit.”

Another reader told us, after finishing the “Why Believe in God?” symposium in the current issue:

“Best...is enjoying the essays collectively as a community testimony to the worshiped God. The many little repeated themes that jump from piece to piece are too cool to have been planned.”

Others are thankful to finally experience community with like-minded people. One 2007 Glen attendee was struck by how

“the Glen has combined a nurturing community with a rigorous exploration of how poetry and art can examine the deepest questions.”

We want to keep up this momentum, to bring culture together with faith in a way that increasingly sustains a world distracted by soul-numbing entertainment and empty polemics.

As demand for our programs continues to grow, so does our desire to keep them fresh and substantive, even as we strive to extend their reach and make them available to more people. But we need your help.

It currently takes $225,000 in yearly grants and donations to maintain our programs. We receive most of that support in end-of-the-year gifts.

But we’d like to do more.

Each year we receive more applications for scholarships to the Glen Workshop, the Image Conference, and the Shaw Summer Fellowship for students than we can fund. We want to help more emerging artists and students participate in our programs.

We want to bring more of the finest writers and artists of faith to our readers and attendees by increasing authors fees and honoraria so that Image is on a par with North America’s leading publications and arts organizations.

The Milton Center Fellowship gives writers the time and space to produce a first book. We need to raise $16,000 to support Jessie van Eerden this year as she works to complete her first novel under the mentorship of acclaimed Northwest writer David James Duncan.

We are currently in the midst of a massive upgrade to our website to allow the Image community to interact with and support each other, and introduce new readers to Image. We need help to launch a blog, produce podcasts, and get more of our rich content out on the Web.

The future is full of promise, but we can’t carry on the work we’ve been called to alone.

If you already give to Image, would you consider increasing your gift to help us meet these goals? If you haven’t given before, please think about making Image a priority. We rely on this annual appeal to continue the work we’ve started.

Your gift—whether $30, $50, $100, $500, or $1,000—will enable us to continue to renew culture through art. Thanks, as ever, for your steadfast support.

Cordially,

Gregory Wolfe

P.S. Always feel free to e-mail me at gwolfe@imagejournal.org. I’d love to hear from you.

To make a financial contribution to Image, click the link below.