Have Faith in Art: A Conversation with Aaron Rosen
Jun 15, 2019
Show notes
Today’s conversation is with Image’s new visual arts editor, Aaron Rosen.
Aaron is Professor of Religion & Visual Culture and Director of the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts & Religion at Wesley Theological Seminary. But he also generates and participates in conversations about religion and the arts outside of academia. He’s spoken at universities, museums, and religious institutions around the world. He writes books about art for adults and children; he’s contributed to newspapers and magazines, and provided commentary for the BBC. He also enjoys working directly with artists and has co-curated exhibitions, including an international traveling Stations of the Cross.
Aaron is Jewish, and his wife, Carolyn Rosen, is an Episcopal priest, so he has a special interest in thinking about and practicing inter-faith dialogue. He wants to bring an expansive, multi-faith element to Image’s art coverage while we remain fully engaged in the contemporary art world. He has what he calls an “old-fashioned commitment to really good art,” because the best art, he says, helps us think better theologically.
I talked to Aaron about growing up with a Jewish father and Catholic mother; how religion is, for him, a creative experience; and why we need to have, literally, more faith in art.
Something to Push Against: A Conversation with Shane McCrae
May 19, 2019
Show notes
When my guest, poet Shane McCrae, was in high school, he made what he calls a “serious existential commitment” to quit life. The child of a black father and a white mother, has was raised in part by his maternal grandparents, who were white supremacists and denied that he was black. By the time he was in junior high, he was flunking out of school and didn’t care much for anything, he says, besides skateboarding and music.
Then, in high school, he saw a cheesy movie that changed his life, because in it, a girl read a poem by Sylvia Plath.
He “became profoundly obsessed.” He had an idea that “poetry was either going to be the key to the rest of my life, or there just wasn’t going to be a key.”
Shane McCrae
He became a regular at the school library, poring over books about poets’ lives. Plath’s poetry struck him as sad, but the sadness, he said, somehow made him feel better.
McCrae dropped out of high school. He was a dad by the age of 18. He got his GED and started community college, eventually transferring to the University of Oregon, where he discovered his favorite poetry, Elizabethan and Renaissance English poetry. Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene became “necessary”, he says, to his conception of himself, his world, his art. He went on to get an MFA and a JD from Harvard Law.
Since 2010, he’s written six books of poetry including his most recent, the Guilded Auction Block. He’s received numerous awards and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
His is an extraordinary story, but McCrae often speaks of the details of his life with what the New Yorker described as “a judicial coolness that makes the details all the more devastating.” Maybe those details are so devastating because behind McCrae’s literary success is a story of the America we know exists but would prefer did not.
His poems are written in meter (he says he wants to adhere to rules) and yet they approximate the sound of the subconscious, as Amelia Klein noted in her review of his book Mule for the Boston Review. Klein wrote that McCrae’s poems “do what the mind does with words when it isn’t using them intentionally but murmuring to itself consolingly and censoriously of its own imperfectly recorded history.”
For this episode I talked to Shane McCrae about his new role as poetry editor at Image. We also talked about depression, his love for Sylvia Plath, how the rules of poetry help him to engage the infinite (writing in free verse makes him anxious, he says), and how this connects to a spiritual path that led him from atheism to Islam to the Episcopal Church.
We Are All Small Things: A Conversation with Chigozie Obioma
Apr 19, 2019
Show notes
Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma has been hailed as the heir to Chinua Achebe. He was born into a family of 12 children in the southwestern part of Nigeria, where he grew up speaking Yoruba, Igbo, and English. His first novel, The Fishermen, published in 2015, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities, was one of the most anticipated of 2019.
As a child, Obioma says he was fascinated by Greek myths and the British masters, including Shakespeare, John Milton, and John Bunyan. He’s also a Christian who grew up in the Assemblies of God and now attends a Baptist church.
He says that Orchestra is the book he always wanted to write. It’s a novel about West African belief systems, as Paradise Lost was written in the Christian tradition. The novel also borrows the familiar classical scaffolding of Homer’s Odyssey, loads it with African folklore and languages and casts a poor migrant farmer in the lead role. It reads like an epic myth, spanning 500 years and both the earth and the cosmos, narrated by the protagonist’s ancient guardian spirit.
“When a sentence jumps all of the rhetorical hurdles that life and our saturated minds place along the way to reach sublimity, I become moved to near tears.” --Chigozie Obioma
Regarding the title, Obioma said in another interview: “No matter how privileged you think you are, on a spiritual level, we are all minorities–small things.”
This story asks if it’s ever possible for the “minorities” in the cosmos—all of us—to overcome that which has been deemed our fate.
Obioma recently joined the Image editorial advisory board. He spoke with Image’s Executive Editor, Mary Kenagy Mitchell, at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe. In this episode, they discuss how language acts as barrier and bond, the spirituality of rivers, the reality of evil and how Christianity looks different in America.
“No matter how privileged you think you are, on a spiritual level, we are all minorities–small things.”
Why Do We Need the Arts? A Conversation with James K. A. Smith
Apr 02, 2019
Show notes
We are best catechized by our senses. We learn from parables and fairy tales, stories with the same homespun elements in infinite arrangements that we come to know by heart.
It’s why I so often say that it is art and story that drew me back to the practice of faith, not theology.
“The Spirit is operative in spaces and places and institutions outside the church.” —James K.A. Smith
“Liturgies work affectively and aesthetically,” writes Image’s new editor in chief, James K. A. Smith in his book, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. “They grab hold of our guts through the power of image, story, and metaphor. That’s why the most powerful liturgies are attuned to our embodiment; they speak to our senses; they get under our skin.”
Smith, who is also a philosophy professor at Calvin College, argues that traditional Christian worship re-orients our hearts toward eternity, while so much contemporary worship only apes popular culture, with churches designed to feel like secular spaces, arenas, malls and coffee shops.
Smith’s work has always moved me, not just as a person of faith but as a writer and artist, making me more aware of how art bends my internal compass, one way or another.
The Monster Christ with Katie Kresser
Mar 01, 2019
Show notes
I recently contributed a poem to a zine called Ethel. When the editor shared the cover art for the issue, it shocked the group of women in which it was shared–Christians, agnostics, churched and unchurched.
Menstruating women see that same diagram every time they open a box of tampons. I remember studying that image for hours even before I started my period, finding it kind of mysterious and maybe even titillating.
What might it have meant to me to have grown up with images of Mary that showed her to have a body like mine, facing the same kinds of challenges and changes? How might it have altered my experience or perception of menstruation, childbirth, to connect the workings of my own body to the workings of a woman’s body deemed sacred and holy?
Dr. Katie Kresser, Seattle Pacific University’s resident art historian, believes that great art teaches us that kind of empathy, unveils human nature, and forces us to think outside the box.
“The great artists are the ones who have forced a paradigm shift, literally reshaping the outlines of human perception.” – Katie Kresser
Her essay, “Christ the Chimera: The Riddle of the Monster Jesus,” appeared in Image 99. In it, she revisits two controversial renderings of Christ from the late 1990s (see show notes below), explaining why they might have more to offer people of faith than our initial reactions assumed.
Katie and I talked about many controversial images of Christ throughout art history, and I asked her, how can artists help people of faith to resist a deadening of their religious vision? How do artists destroy our schemas and disrupt the calcification of faith?
Episode 12: Inside The Flannery Issue
Dec 01, 2017
Show notes
If you’ve been keeping up with us here at Image, you know that our fall issue featured the never-before-published college journal of Flannery O’Connor entitled “Higher Mathematics.” On a special episode of our podcast, Gregory Wolfe sits down with Mark Bosco, SJ, who was instrumental in the publication of “Higher Mathematics,”and is in the midst of producing a documentary about Flannery that is set to premiere in February. Sit back and enjoy this conversation with Mark, as well as a brief reading from the journal itself.
Episode 11: The Art of Criticism with Alissa Wilkinson
Nov 17, 2017
Show notes
Today’s podcast guest has many titles: staff film critic at Vox.com, associate professor of English and Humanities at The King’s College in New York City, published co-author, with Robert Joustra, of How to Survive the Apocalypse (Eerdmans), and a 2013 graduate of the Seattle Pacific University MFA program. Most recently, Alissa taught “The Art of Criticism” at the 2017 Glen Workshop, where she and her students talked about criticism, wrote about criticism, and paid special attention to what makes great criticism. You can find her work on Vox’s website https://www.vox.com/authors/alissa-wilkinson, and keep up with her day-to-day on Twitter as @alissamarie.
If you’re interested in the SPU MFA program, learn more at our revamped website: spu.edu/mfa.
Ep 10: Chasing the Language with Scott Cairns
Nov 03, 2017
Show notes
“To be a poet, you have to write more than you know.” Scott Cairns engages with this idea throughout his interview with Image editor and founder Greg Wolfe, as the pair discuss language, meaning-making, and faith. A recipient of Image’s Denise Levertov award who has been published in our pages over and over again, Scott has been a friend of the journal for years. He currently teaches at the University of Missouri, and also serves as the director for the MFA in Creative Writing at Seattle Pacific University. He has published eight collections of poetry, the most recent being Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems in 2015. In this episode of our show, you’ll hear him read two of his poems, and explore how learning about language enables a richer, deeper sense of what one writes.
For more on Scott, as well as more information about the the SPU MFA program, please visit spu.edu/mfa. Applications for the Winter 2018 residency close November 15, 2017.
Episode 9: Going Underground with Chris Hoke
Oct 20, 2017
Show notes
“I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” These words from the Book of Matthew are quoted often, but it’s rare to see someone living them out, and inviting the rest of us to join him. This week on our show, we’re joined by friend of the journal Chris Hoke, who does both of these things. If you visit Chris’s website, you’ll see three titles under his name: Gang Pastor, Jail Chaplain, and Writer. He and his colleague Neaners Garcia, who is also a former inmate and gang leader, are the founders and Co-Executive Directors of Underground Ministries, a team that works to promote prisoner relationships and reentry after incarceration. Chris chronicles his experiences in his writing, which you can find in several journals, including Image Journal, and on our blog, Good Letters. In 2013, he graduated from the Seattle Pacific University MFA program, and in 2015 HarperCollins published his first book Wanted: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders. This year, Chris served as the chaplain at the MFA’s Whidbey residency, where Paul Anderson sat down with him to talk about his work. You are about to hear that conversation. Plus, stay tuned for a sneak peek of our next episode featuring poet Scott Cairns.
Episode 8: Carolyn Forché and the Poetry of Witness
Oct 06, 2017
Show notes
At the Glen Workshop in August, Image editor Greg Wolfe recorded a nearly hour-long conversation with poet and social activist, Carolyn Forché. Hailed not only for her exquisite poetry but also for her work in promoting greater awareness of “the poetry of witness,” Forché is at once gentle and passionate. Over the course of the conversation she ranges over a variety of topics, from her teaching style to the meaning of “presence” to memorable stories of her friendships with figures like poet Czeslaw Milosz and martyred El Salvadoran bishop, Oscar Romero—about whom she is writing in a new memoir.
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