The Catholic Northwest Interview
To read the interview at 'Archdiocese of Seattle' site click here
Seattle-based journal synthesizes religion and the arts
Editor Gregory Wolfe aims to “enlarge the stock of available reality”
By John Lindblom
It is no wonder, then, that Gregory Wolfe editor of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, and parishioner with his wife, Suzanne, at St. James Cathedral, regards Percy as “about the closest thing we have to a patron saint.” Working very much in Percy’s spirit, Wolfe founded Image over a decade ago to provide a forum for today’s leading creative writers and artists who are working either from within the Judeo-Christian tradition or who are “to some extent outside of institutional religion, [but] at least seriously grappling with it.”
Publishing high-quality fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, essays, and visual artwork, Image today stands as a respected presence in the American literary scene. Its pages have featured such acclaimed writers as National Book Award winner Annie Dillard and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. Its writing also appears in prestigious annual anthologies such as Best American Short Stories.
Wolfe speaks about faith, the arts, and American culture as if from a vast invisible reservoir of knowledge, but also of wisdom and vision. He sees the potential, and the necessity, for Christian faith and human creativity to work together to replenish a parched and fragmented culture. Here are some excerpts from our recent conversation at Image’s editorial office at Seattle Pacific University:
What is the purpose of Image?
The phrase that I always have loved since I first heard it [as] a line in a book review
. . . [is] that this book . . . “enlarges the stock of available reality” . . . In any given age based on our prejudices, based on our dominant ideologies, certain aspects of reality are available to us, and certain aspects are not. And our goal has been to expand the stock of available reality when it comes to the way that art can grapple with issues of faith.
There’s been so much polemics and culture war kind of discourse in America that we feel it’s important that the creative voice be given an opportunity to speak in its own right. My argument is that ultimately political battles are about issues that have to be defined by culture. It’s art and poetry and worship and faith that replenish our sense of the meaning of things.
Since your move here almost four years ago, what impact have Seattle and Image had on each other?
As frequently as it is said that the Northwest is a relatively secular environment . . . we happen to feel that actually presents some opportunities . . . the Seattle
Weekly . . . more or less said, “This is the last thing you’d have considered being present in the arts community here in Seattle, but how interesting that it is here.” So in that sense I think there’s genuine curiosity, and . . . we’re in a very good place to reward
curiosity . . .
And even if you and I privately can agree that a lot of the attacks on the church come from ideologically narrow positions, again, my point is still, if art helps to allay those fears, and transcend those fears, and give people a space, who cares how wrong they were as ideologues? Win them over with goodness, rather than necessarily defeating them polemically on the field of ideological battle. In that sense I think Imag can actually speak to a place that often considers itself post-Christian and yet which occasionally may have doubts about its doubt . . . and if we’re speaking with a voice that has some real humanity in it, and not just some abstracted propagandized understanding of our faith then we should find some points of connection with those people, I hope.
Do you think in that sense Image contributes to Pope John Paul’s vision for a renewal of the arts?
Yes, I mean the pope has spoken about the evangelization of culture, and while the arts don’t specifically evangelize in the way that overt religious language evangelizes, I think the larger issue of the evangelization of culture is the belief that faith needs to penetrate all levels of culture, including the arts . . .
Faith and culture need to enrich each other, and the pope is anything but a fortress-mentality thinker. He is all about trying to synthesize, not separate. He is about saying, “What is the best that’s being thought, and done, out of the larger realm?”
We wholeheartedly embrace the pope’s vision, because what art tries to do is find that new synthesis: it’s to take the thesis and the antithesis and come up with a synthesis. Ancient faith — new artistic forms . . the novel by a Ron Hansen, or the great non-fiction book by an Annie Dillard, or a great painting by, say, a Melissa Weinman . . . of saints in modern settings or any of the examples of things that we’ve published over the years.
What aspects of the arts should American Catholics today be paying attention to, that perhaps they’re not aware of?
Well, in some ways I think Catholics have been less susceptible to the fortress mentality than many other Christians in this culture, because they’ve always lived with the belief that culture is important, and that culture incarnates ideas and beliefs. But I feel that many Catholics — they read the novels that are coming out, they listen to the music that’s being made — that Catholics sometimes need to pay a little extra attention to art being made under the impetus of faith. That they become a little too undiscriminating.
At times I feel that they have lost an interest in the way that the Christian faith can create masterpieces of art and be nourished by those specifically. I think a lot of Catholics don’t know that in some ways the greatest Catholic writer of the present time is Annie Dillard, a person who has never made a secret of her faith, even if it’s not directly proselytizing in her work. But here’s a woman who writes not only beautiful prose, but prose that grapples with very rich theological and philosophical issues. I mean, her book For the Time Being is . . . all about how can a good God create a world in which malformed children are born, for example.