Skip to content

Log Out

×

Returning to Form

By Peggy RosenthalNovember 20, 2019

    We’re all familiar with how traditional Western art forms were blown to bits in the early to mid-twentieth century. And we know the locus classicus for this in literature: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, written in the wake of the First World War’s perceived destruction of civilization. Recall The Waste Land‘s characteristic phrases:…

Read More

How to Celebrate at Death

By Peggy RosenthalOctober 23, 2019

Not every death calls forth celebration. But when the loss is of someone who was granted the gift of a long, good life, it’s that life that we can celebrate. I’m moved to ponder this gift—and how we who remain can celebrate it—because during a single week this past summer, I went to three different…

Read More

Poetry Friday: “Curriculum Vitae”

By Peggy RosenthalOctober 11, 2019

What fun to find a sonnet in Image 102! Yes, a true sonnet—following the meter (iambic pentameter), stanza breaks, and rhyme scheme of a traditional sonnet. Other contemporary poets have explored the sonnet form engagingly: I think of Mark Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets and Jeanne Murray Walker’s new collection Pilgrim: You Find the Path by Walking.…

Read More

Poetry Friday: “Glosa”

By Peggy RosenthalSeptember 13, 2019

“Glosa” refers to an invented language created as a way for all the world’s speakers to understand each other.

Read More

Robert Cording, Simon Weil, and “Attention”

By Peggy RosenthalJuly 25, 2019

Decades ago, when I was being drawn from atheism through agnosticism toward Christianity, somehow Simone Weil’s writings came into my hands. Literally into my hands: so struck was I by her words that I copied pages and pages of them into my journal. Weil became my spiritual director. She led my spirit to eventually embrace…

Read More

Poetry Friday: “Reflection upon Psalm 121”

By Christopher HowellJuly 12, 2019

My husband and I pray together after breakfast and after dinner, using The Liturgy of the Hours (a version of the former breviary used by Catholic priests but, after Vatican II, made available to the laity). Each Morning and Evening Prayer includes two psalms. Psalm 121 is read on one Friday evening every four weeks.…

Read More

Art as Survival: The Terezín Concentration Camp

By Peggy RosenthalJune 17, 2019

I go to lots of classical music concerts, but I’ve never been so moved as I was by this one. It wasn’t just the profundity of the music; it was also, and especially, the context in which it was composed. The concert was called Music from Terezín Concentration Camp. I’m ashamed to admit that I…

Read More

Poetry Friday: “Articulation”

By Scott CairnsMay 24, 2019

It’s a truism that the writer’s material is words. We rely on our words to do their work: to “mean” something. But in his poem “Articulation,” Scott Cairns questions this reliance. The poem’s speaker says that his only “certainty,” paradoxically, is that his language “falls / ever short.” What he has “come to trust” is…

Read More

The Fearless Curiosity of the Ying Quartet

By Peggy RosenthalMay 8, 2019

Ying Quartet, l-r: David Ying (cello), Janet Ying (violin), new first violinist Robin Scott, and Phillip Ying (viola) outside Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre, Eastman School of Music March 23, 2015 // photo by J. Adam Fenster / University of Rochester Of all the arts, music is the most difficult to write about. Maybe because…

Read More

Poetry Friday: “Before All Things”

By Tania RunyanApril 26, 2019

Imagine the Gospel narrative taking place right in your home town, right now. How would you know what was going on? How would you react? This is what Tania Runyan imagines with delightful grace in “Before All Things.” In her telling, the key moments in the gospels happen almost simultaneously. First, Christ dies as “a…

Read More

Receive ImageUpdate, our free weekly newsletter featuring the best from Image and the world of arts & faith

* indicates required