Carey Wallace is the author of The Blind Contessa's New Machine, which tells the story of the invention of the typewriter in 1808 by an Italian count for a blind woman so that she could write him letters. It’s a love story, but it’s also about the imagination and how it fails us. Patti Smith, one of Wallace’s heroes, called it "exquisitely written" and "a jewel. Now Wallace has trained her focus on artistic inspiration, both how it is historically discussed in relationship to artists, and how we as contemporary working artists might honor, cultivate, and capture it.

Lanecia Rouse Tinsley is an abstract artist based in Houston, Texas. She creates out of a desire to make the invisible landscapes within us known, using texture, form and color to speak to life in ways she feels words cannot. She says she is drawn to the “negative spaces” in life—times of ambiguity and uncertainty, silence and mystery.

Halloween kicks off the Octave of the Dead, eight days when Christians traditionally prayed for the souls of the departed. For this episode of the podcast I talked to Elizabeth Harper, whose essay, “The Cult of the Beheaded,” in Image 102, explores one culture’s particular history of praying with the remains of the dead.

On the importance of artistic and spiritual friendships to our work and faith, how both church and friendship have served to break us down and put us back together, and how our favorite films do that too: from Mike Leigh’s Another Year and the documentaries of French filmmaker Agnès Varda to The Muppet Movie.

Poet Molly McCully Brown’s prizewinning first collection, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, is about a real, state-run residential hospital for people with serious mental and physical disabilities that was the epicenter of the American eugenics movement in the first half of the twentieth century. If she’d been born in another time, Molly Brown might have been a patient at the Virginia Colony.

Social media has given women writers more opportunities, more power, and more authority in the public sphere and also in the church. But there’s also enormous pressure from publishers to create your brand. To establish platforms of countless followers before you even publish a book. To live up to—or to live down—your social media…

Black people are producing—have always produced—creative works of theology that must be seriously considered within the mainstream of Christian tradition if we are to dismantle white supremacy.

Malcolm Guite is a priest, poet, songwriter, and chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge. He’s also served as a chaplain at our Glen Workshops in Santa Fe. I came to know Guite’s work through the online community Sick Pilgrim, where his book, Sounding the Seasons, a collection of sonnets inspired by the liturgical year,…

Image is a religious journal, but maybe not in the way you’d expect. Our executive editor, Mary Kenagy Mitchell, says that “we give voice to writers who are devout, or full of doubt. The grapplers, the joyful, the angry, the bereaved, the confused. The connecting thread is the effort to get language and…

In the novel The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon, a young woman at an elite American university is drawn into a religious cult. Phoebe Lin is wealthy, beloved, popular, but she’s secretly overcome by grief. She doesn’t tell anyone she blames herself for her mother’s recent death. Over the course of the book, Phoebe is is…