In this episode, Anthony D’Ambrosio interviews Gregory Wolfe, founder and editor of the the Image Journal. It is a true honor to have him on the podcast. He has been called “one of the most incisive and persuasive voices of our generation” (Ron Hansen). Through the journal and through his work in the academic world, he has sparked a resurgence of interest in the relationship between art and religion, which has had widespread impact both on religious communities and the public square. He was the founding director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at SPU, and author of many formational books, such as Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age.
In this podcast, we talk about Gregory’s story- about his transformation from a young voice of conservatism in the “culture wars” into a champion of cultural change through art. This lead to his mission to found the Image Journal, which he began with the intention of discovering this generation's T.S. Elliots and Flannery O'Connor's. In other words, he wanted to support artists who were redeeming the culture.
Check out Read their mission and try not to get excited:
“We believe that the great art that has emerged from these faith traditions is dramatic, not didactic—incarnational, not abstract. And so our focus has been on works of imagination that embody a spiritual struggle, like Jacob wrestling with the angel. In our pages the larger questions of existence intersect with what the poet Albert Goldbarth calls the “greasy doorknobs and salty tearducts” of our everyday lives.””