Artist of the Month: Jeffrey Overstreet
Jeffrey Overstreet is a trespasser. He's constantly moving outside of the borders of what church and culture deem to be ironclad, eternal categories (sacred vs. profane, high culture vs. popular culture)—and he has a knack for bringing people along with him. His passport? The imagination. In his writing on film, he has used the mighty megaphone of Christianity Today to challenge its readers to take a more mature, holistic approach to film. His film criticism doesn't count swear words or anatomical parts; rather, it speaks of beauty, paradox, and what it means to be human. Overstreet has pursued this vocation with such integrity and forcefulness that the secular media have picked up on it—precisely because he dares to trespass against the arbitrary categories of what is deemed "religious" and what is considered "public." He brings this spirit of freedom to all that he does, from his many illuminating posts on various online message boards to his writing for Seattle Pacific University's publications to his newest venture: fantasy novels. Even there he's crossing boundaries, bringing a more literary sensibility to a genre that's often mere swords and sorcery. When you trespass with Jeffrey Overstreet, you don't have to ask for forgiveness.

Click here to go to the Artist of the Month page on Jeffrey Overstreet.

A Defense of Ardor by Adam Zagajewski
Born in 1945, Adam Zagajewski is among the most highly esteemed of contemporary Polish poets—a list that includes Nobel winners Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborksa, as well as Zbigniew Herbert. Widely known for such books of poetry as Canvas (1991), Mysticism for Beginners (1997), and Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002), Zagajewski is also a highly regarded essayist. In his most recent offering, A Defense of Ardor (2004), addressing such subjects as poetry, art, memory, and philosophy, Zagajewski argues for the often marginalized ideas of beauty and ardor. Discussing the book’s central focus with Poets & Writers, he explained: “Why ardor? Because, I think, there’s not enough of it in our time. Or, at least in our literature. There’s too much lukewarm irony, too much sophisticated indulgence.” In the book’s title essay, Zagajewski introduces Plato’s idea of metaxu: “being ‘in between,’ in between our earth, our (so we suppose) comprehensible, concrete, material surroundings, and transcendence, mystery.” After discussing what he perceives as a societal fixation with low irony and the merely quotidian, Zagajewski uses metaxu as an idea from which to argue for transcendence in both literature and life: “…ardor precedes irony … Ardor: the earth’s fervent song, which we answer with our own, imperfect song … Beauty isn’t only for aesthetes; beauty is for anyone who seeks a serious road. It is a summons, a promise, if not of happiness, as Stendhal hoped, then of a great and endless journey.” Filled with insight and intelligence, the following thirteen essays range from Zagajewski’s portrait of the Polish painter, Jozef Czapski (“Toil and Flame”), to a letter of instruction to apprentice poets (“Young Poets, Please Read Everything”). Amidst the high aim of his poetics and life, Zagajewski is noticeably humorous, and often humbly self-deprecating. Even in his approach to poetry, he reminds the reader that a sense of humor is essential: “A high style unaccompanied by a sense of humor—a sense of humor brimming with forbearance for our cruel, comic, and imperfect world—would become a chilly mausoleum.” Zagajewski currently lives in Krakow, and spends part of the year in Houston, Texas where he teaches at the University of Houston. Often called a modern mystic, Zagajewski finds the tensions of the poetic life to be inescapable: “I’m a recluse who loves the dialectic of being at the same time within and against a community.” Thankfully for those in the community of readers, this tension has provided a thought provoking and timely book.

To buy a copy of A Defense of Ardor, click here.

Dana Gioia and Gregory Wolfe to Speak
in Washington, D.C., May 5
If you are in the Washington, D.C. area, please come out for a special presentation: “Can Poetry Matter? A Dialogue on the Role of the Poet in Today's World.” The featured speaker will be Dana Gioia—poet, critic, best-selling anthologist and the Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts. Joining him will be Paolo Valesio, Professor Emeritus, Yale University, and Chairman of the Department of Italian at Columbia University, and Gregory Wolfe, Publisher and Editor of Image journal. The event is sponsored by Crossroads DC Cultural Center. The Center describes itself as “a meeting place for people who share a passion for knowing. This passion is aroused by wonder and attraction because ‘out there’ things are, because life is given, always as a new and unexpected event that nourishes our experience. This focus on reality as event (and not on ideas) determines the style of our cultural work. We prize encountering people, because every human being is an irreducible novelty. We want to meet them at the crossroads of life, regardless of any cultural, religious or social boundary. We value beauty, because it sparks the wonder and attraction at the origin of human experience. We are interested in the events that shape our world, because what happens always contains a suggestion, a hint that affects and may change our lives. We cherish appreciating and testing our heritage, because the fabric of our life is woven from all the events that happened before us. Thus, Crossroads aims to be, above all, a place where education takes place, that is, where we may learn to look with openness, curiosity and critical judgment at every aspect of reality.” “Can Poetry Matter” will take place on Friday, May 5, 2006 at 7 pm, George Washington University, Room 113 of 1957 E Street NW, Washington, D.C.

To download the flyer, click here.

For the George Washington University campus map, click here.

For the Crossroads DC home page, click here.

Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent
by Lyanda Lynn Haupt
The naturalist Charles Darwin has the mixed honor of being the great bugbear of creationists as well as the seminal theoretician of modern biology. As such, he’s drawn a range of responses from within religious circles, including sometimes taking the blame for all the evils of modernism. Science has its culture wars just as the arts do—but Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from Darwin's Lost Notebooks will disappoint anyone looking for ammunition for either side of that fight. Here, in elegant, lyric prose, Haupt imagines the inner life of twenty-two-year-old Darwin when he journeyed to the Pacific on the HMS Beagle in 1831. The book is lovingly researched, personal, imaginative, and thoroughly anti-polemical. If it has a thesis statement at all, it is simply this: that small things are worthy of our deepest attention. In that sense, this is spiritual writing. In her introduction, she says: “This book is not in any way meant to pose as a biography; it is a gleaning of those instances in Darwin’s life and work that inspire a renewed vision of the relationship between the human and natural worlds, and a glimpse into the various ways these older stories might mingle with newer ones. Darwin’s very personal scientific methods grew out of the observations contained in his field notes, and in their creases he foists upon us his strict but beautiful maxim. Nothing in the natural world is beneath our notice—he almost whacks us on the head with it. Nothing. In a modern scientific era that discards heaps of organisms as unworthy of representation in a scientific journal because of the lack of ‘statistical significance,’ I try to take Darwin’s vision to heart.” Haupt particularly engages with Darwin’s sense of beauty, wonder, and awe as they developed over the course of his life—and in the final chapters (one of which appeared in Image #46), his faith. Readers who love Annie Dillard’s nature writing will find much to admire. Haupt’s prose is so lovely and readable, her observations so keen and poetic that this book should by rights earn a wide audience—and give readers outside the science world and in it a more nuanced picture of one of modernity’s looming figures.

Read more at Powell’s Books here.

Barn Swallow by Margaret D. Smith
Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s Darwin might have found much to his liking in Margaret D. Smith's new collection of poems—and not just because of the title. A watcher of birds and other creatures, Smith also turns a grateful eye to nature, using the quiet language of poetry to slow outside distraction to a near standstill. In that devoted attention, Barn Swallow lovingly brings into focus the things that would be otherwise lost to view. Prayer-like in their simplicity, many of these poems hearken to Blake’s Songs of Innocence as they build delicate tableaus of woodpeckers and goldfinches rustling with the wind in the trees, “spinning / dry scent through the grove.” But as with Blake, all is not idyllic here. There is more in Smith’s words than their sparseness first reveals. A lemon tree in her grandmother’s backyard rises Edenic, “so heavy with fruit … To our noses they grew so / holy, too bad we had to pull them down for tea and lemon pie.” In the same poem the sharp turn of experience catches up with the children’s delight at finding baby mice in the nearby ivy. When the mice are “scooped up” by the grandfather’s pragmatic hands and “dumped … in the incinerator behind the garage,” the children instinctively know that no uprising or protest will change the state of things. The wisdom and sorrow of a kept innocence fills these poems, culminating in the image of Jesus in “Skin,” who let the children not only come to him, but “touched the names of each of them with his tongue, / clicking and clucking to make them giggle.” Not ten pages later, Christ’s “loincloth weeps red” and not children but the brokenhearted gather around him with cries to “Reconcile / me, Lord, reconcile.” Other violations point to losses natural and unnatural. A beached whale “head thrown back in a still cry” sends the speaker to “struggle so long / for the sense of it, / banging against dark cages,” asking of her now-grown son, “Did the waves cover you, suck / you from your crib, slip / you singing, back / to your mother?” But throughout, Smith returns to nature as her balm, to trees that make “tabernacles” for “one private bird … spilling / hot bird cries in the temple,” reminding us of just whose eye is on the sparrow.

To buy a copy of Barn Swallow, contact the author at margaret@spu.edu or Brass Weight Press at press@brassweight.com. For more on Margaret Smith, click here.

Gallery Watch

Lydia Bodnar-Balahutrak's Chornobyl -
A Solo Art Exhibition
April 26, 2006 marks the 20-year anniversary of the nuclear plant explosion in Chornobyl, Ukraine. Ten years ago, Lydia Bodnar-Balahutrak visited the Chornobyl Zone with a Ukrainian radio-oncologist for an officially sanctioned one-day visit of the radiation-saturated, fenced 40-mile wide circle northwest of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. What she saw and experienced, along with much material gathered and documented since 1986, is at the heart of the selection of artwork in her University of Houston-Clear Lake solo exhibition, Chornobyl. The exhibition features mixed media paintings that combine seemingly contradictory and disparate materials and processes-lead and gold, organic and inert materials, hand embroidery and torching. The thirteen works on canvas, wood, and paper, selected from several series begun after 1986 and continuing through 2005, evoke the Chornobyl cataclysm in its many manifestations. Accompanying the exhibit is the artist's essay, recounting her impressions of the Zone and reflecting on ways it influenced her ensuing artwork. Lydia Bodnar-Balahutrak's solo exhibition Chornobyl is on view from now through May 31, 2006 in the Art Gallery of the University of Houston-Clear Lake, the Bayou Building , Atrium I, First Level. The gallery is located at 2700 Bay Area Blvd., Houston, Texas 77058. Gallery hours are 8 am - 6 pm Monday through Thursday, 8 am - 12 pm on Friday, or by prior arrangement. Visitor parking is provided in front of the Bayou Building. For further information, please call UH/CL at 281-283-3446.

Avoda: Objects of the Spirit
The Jewish Museum of Florida and Braman Family Foundation present 42 pieces of Jewish ceremonial art created by internationally renowned painter and sculptor Tobi Kahn. This exhibit explores the rise of spirituality in America and the personal relevance of ritual and tradition in daily life. Avoda: Objects of the Spirit will be on display from March 7 – August 20, 2006. The Jewish Museum of Florida is located on 301 Washington Aveune, Miami Beach, FL 33139. For more information, visit http://www.jewishmuseum.com/.

Upcoming

Seeing God: A Call for Entries
Seeing God, a nationally juried show sponsored by The Dadian Gallery of the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts and Religion and the Washington Printmakers Gallery, announces a call for entries. Selected artists will have their work shown at the exhibition from October 23, 2006 to December 15, 2006.

For more information, click here.

NYCITA: At the Crossroads of Theatre and Faith
Join Christians in the Theater Arts June 15-17, 2006 in New York for a fast-paced journey to the intersection between Christianity and theater. A first-rate group of scholars, pastors and artists will offer intellectual challenge each morning in plenary sessions at Calvary Baptist Church 123 W. 57th Street in the heart of New York City. The afternoon will be reserved for a variety of excursions into the city. Over the weekend, we'll explore every facet of theater, faith, and the experience of working and living in the Big Apple.

For more information, go to http://www.cita.org/cita.html, email nycita@cita.org, or call 877-277-CITA.

If you have information other ImageUpdate readers might find interesting, share it here! Do you have a question that you hope a member of the ImageUpdate community might have the answer to? Ask it here. Have your messages posted by sending an email to gwolfe@spu.edu.

New Arts Ministry in Need of Help
I am part of a small group hoping to start an arts ministry at our local church. We're currently in the pre-pre-preplanning stages and will be meeting soon to discuss the possibility. We've brainstormed a bit and have a few ideas, including a chapbook, a lecture series, and a visual arts exhibition/show. I'm wondering if some of you can help me a bit. A few questions: first, I'm wondering how many of you have been involved in the planning of such a ministry. Do you mind sharing your experiences with me? I'd appreciate any advice or caveats regarding this endeavor. Second, three of us are planning on forming a small group this summer and meeting to discuss this arts ministry project. Can you recommend some good books on Christianity and the arts? Any other ideas would be appreciated. If you've ran a chapbook competition, for example, I'd love to see some of your materials (calls for submissions, perhaps?). Please contact Jeff Newberry at jeff.newberry@gmail.com.

Call for Entries: 2006 IFRAA / Faith & Form Awards Program for Religious Art & Architecture
The Annual Religious Art and Architecture Design Awards Program is co-sponsored by Faith & Form Magazine and the Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art, and Architecture (IFRAA), a professional interest area (PIA) of the American Institute of Architects. The Awards Program was founded in 1978 with the goal of honoring the best in architecture, design, and art for religious spaces. There are four primary categories for awards: religious architecture, liturgical/interior design, religious arts, and sacred landscape (just added last year). Entries are welcomed and encouraged from architects, designers, artists, and consultants. Any person responsible for the original work of art may enter regardless of project location (worldwide), project size, budget, or style. Award recipients receive significant recognition, including printed and framed citations, recognition at an IFRAA awards presentation, full-page coverage in Faith & Form’s Annual Awards Issue, and project board exhibition at the AIA National Convention. The application deadline is May 26, 2006; the entry submission deadline is July 7, 2006. For information about eligibility, submission requirements, or other questions, please contact: Ann Kendall, Faith & Form Awards Program at akendall@faithandform.com, 206.938.6202, or via fax at206.260.1447.

If you are interested in subscribing to Faith & Form Magazine, please visit faithnform.com.

To view more information about the IFRAA call for entries, please visit http://www.faithandform.com/raa_awards.php.

Crisis, Catharsis, and Contemplation in Australia
Crisis, Catharsis, and Contemplation is a landmark exhibition of contemporary art installed in the neo-gothic side chapels, confessionals, and sacred spaces of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne, Australia and St. Mary's Cathedral in Sydney, Australia. The exhibition includes works by both religious and non-religious artists, ranging from the ambivalent to the devout. Their video projections, light and sound installations, stained glass, sculptures, drawings and paintings sensitively engage with the Cathedral space and enter into an artistic dialogue with the gothic architecture. The works compete for attention while calling for a rediscovery of meaning in the original nineteenth century stained glass, carved stone, and architecture. The exhibition invites reflection on the often fraught relationship between art, Christian faith, and the Catholic Church. Curated by David Rastas, Crisis, Catharsis, and Contemplation has been kindly supported by John Garratt Publishing, the Catholic Development Fund, the Archdiocese of Melbourne, and Artes Christi. The exhibition opens on April 28, 2006 at 6 pm and runs through May 18, before moving to St. Mary’s Cathedral. St. Patrick's Cathedral is located on the corner Albert St. and Gisborne St., East Melbourne, and is open every day from 9 am - 5 pm. Admission is free. For photographs of the work and further information, contact David Rastas at +61 407 047 887, davidrastas@gmail.com, or Ishmael Bryce at + 61 3 9421 6726.

The Third Annual Denise Levertov Award Goes to: Kathleen Norris
Every year Image and the Seattle Pacific University English Department present the Denise Levertov Award, named after one of the twentieth century’s finest poets, to an artist or creative writer whose work exemplifies a serious and sustained engagement with the Judeo-Christian tradition. This year’s recipient is Kathleen Norris, award-winning poet and spiritual writer whose work is at once intimate and historical, rich in poetry, meditation, exasperation, and reverence. Her first non-fiction book, Dakota: A Spiritual Biography, was named the New York Times “Notable Book of the Year,” an arresting exploration of the day-to-day that reflects upon the self, social and spiritual community, and a landscape as astonishing as it is unforgiving. Since Dakota’s release, Norris has continued to draw together the ordinary with stirrings of mystery. Her portrait of the monastic life in The Cloister Walk follows in the path of Thomas Merton, unfolding the daily habits of devotion and discipline, with gentle attention to the lives of the saints, Emily Dickinson, and the realities of loneliness, celibacy, and monogamy. Her newest release, The Virgin of Bennington, accompanies Norris in confessional mode as a young woman entering the New York art world of the ‘60s and ‘70s, before her move to South Dakota. Part “pondering visionary,” part “news reporter,” Norris writes so as to mingle the dust of daily life with language “as refreshing as a rain that drenches parched soil.” Kathleen Norris is the author of Dakota: A Spiritual Geography and the bestsellers Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith and The Virgin of Bennington. Her seven volumes of poetry include Falling Off and Little Girls in Church. Norris has been in residence twice at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, and has been an oblate of Assumption Abbey in North Dakota for nearly twenty years and divides her time between South Dakota and Honolulu, Hawaii.

Held in partnership this year with St. Mark’s Cathedral and co-sponsored by the SPU Department of English and MFA in Creative Writing program, the Levertov Award presentation and reading will take place May 24 at 7:30 pm in the nave at St. Mark’s Cathedral. Norris will give a lecture entitled, “The Relief of Hearing Language: Readings with Commentary,” and read from some of her current work following the presentation. The event is free and open to the public.

For more information, click here.

Register Now for the 2006 Glen Workshop!
“Love and Affliction: Art and the Paradox of Suffering”
July 30 – August 6, 2005

The Glen Workshop is Image's illuminating conference on the arts and religion, where participants practice and strengthen their craft and vision in community. This weeklong event combines the best elements of a workshop, an arts festival, and a symposium. By exploring this year’s theme, “Love and Affliction: Art and the Paradox of Suffering,” participants will share a common ground for discussion during the week. Morning workshops are small enough to allow the faculty to give close attention to each participant—to beginners as well as those advanced in their craft. This year’s faculty includes illustrator Barry Moser, playwright Arlene Hutton, poets Scott Cairns and Jeanine Hathaway, Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist of Over the Rhine, fiction writer Bret Lott, mixed-media artist Barry Krammes, porcelain artist Ginger Geyer, and others. Afternoons and evenings at the Glen feature faculty readings, lectures, and presentations. Each evening concludes with an ecumenical worship service that incorporates the arts. This year’s musician-in-residence, Pierce Pettis, will be giving a concert as well as playing during worship throughout the week; Eugene Peterson will be the homilist. Free time offers participants opportunities for writing, conversation, hiking, and exploring the stunning scenery and cultural treasures in and around Santa Fe. Surrounded by the stark, dramatic beauty of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the Glen is hosted at St. John’s campus and is within easy reach of the rich cultural, artistic, and spiritual traditions of northern New Mexico. Please note that class sizes are limited: don’t wait too long to register!

If you are on the Image subscriber list, you’ll automatically receive a brochure. If you’d like to have one mailed to you, send us an e-mail by clicking here.

To register for the Glen Workshop, click here.

And for a personal perspective on the Glen experience, read Roz Dimon’s brief reflection here.

Image Forum: Let Your Voice Be Heard!
As a quarterly journal, Image doesn't have a "Letters to the Editor" section that you see in periodicals that appear more frequently. We've always regretted that, because through our pages--and programs like the Glen Workshop and the Image Conference--we've been striving to build community, to stimulate a larger conversation in artistic and religious circles, both in this country and around the world. Now, thanks to some hard work on our webmaster's part, we've launched the Image Forum, a full-featured online message board system. You now have the chance to post and respond to a host of message threads. Write a virtual Letter to the Editor. Start a thread in any of several different forums devoted to particular art forms. Share your work with others. Let us know how to make the Forum better. Let your voice be heard!

http://forum.imagejournal.org

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