John’s Gospel describes a pool outside Jerusalem called Bethesda where sick and busted people waited, watching the water’s surface for agitation. They believed angels stirred the pool, charging it with healing powers. I imagine some died waiting: dehydrated and rank, beside a pool they dared not enter before its sanctification. “And one day,” Annie Dillard…

Does the imagination play a role in spiritual experience, I asked. How about in religious experience? On a Thursday morning late in the semester, a dozen undergraduates–honors students–and I gathered in a circle in the Laurel Forum, a room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves along one wall, another wall all windows opening onto the campus quad. A…

Dear Friends: I received two emails recently from writers you likely know and admire. Like clockwork, I can expect an email from Annie Dillard a week after each new issue is published. Her response to issue #92 arrived right on schedule: “This is the best Image ever published. These writers stun me.” Then, the day after…

The following is adapted from an address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in Creative Writing commencement ceremony last month. For centuries, wise men and women of various traditions have troubled the terms being and becoming, without arriving at anything like conclusion. We affirm the beauty and joy of being—being writers, being Christians, being…

As I was looking over Image’s website analytics at the end of 2016, I confess that I was overcome with affection and gratitude for you, our online readers. Your attention has painted a picture, and it is a significantly different picture than many other outlets show. The New Yorker, for example, introduced their most-reads thus: “Americans, as…

Dear readers, When Image was founded in 1989, we turned to a few literary exemplars for endorsements. After all, we had no reputation, money, or power, so we needed to find advocates whose words carried authority. One of the first we turned to was Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Dillard, whose incandescent prose dealt with some of…

This editorial statement from issue 88 is continued from yesterday. Read Part 1 here.  In 1994, Image was in its infancy, and I was living in Wichita and working with the Milton Center, a nonprofit devoted to fostering excellence in creative writing by people of religious faith. Thanks to a major grant, we were able…

The following appears as the editorial statement in Image issue 88. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is…