What Is Image Journal?
Image Journal (imagejournal.org) is a literary and arts quarterly founded in 1989 that publishes writing and visual art informed by, or grappling with, religious faith and spiritual questions. It is the right starting point if you want contemporary fiction, poetry, essays, and art that take faith seriously as a subject rather than as a label — and it is probably not what you want if you are looking for devotional material, denominational teaching, or news about a specific church.
What Image publishes
The journal is anchored by its quarterly print issues, each of which mixes genres in a single volume. Issue 129, described on the site, is representative:
- Fiction, including work in translation (Miral al-Tahawy)
- Poetry (Lawrence Joseph, Li-Young Lee, Allison Seay)
- Visual art, including installation work (Eileen Ryan's Spiritual Microbiome: Notes on Blood and Water, which appears on the cover)
- Essays and culture writing, such as Lia Purpura's "An Object Arrived" and Amy Bornman on Karen Russell's The Antidote
- Interviews and reported pieces, including a conversation with George Saunders and KC McGinnis on photojournalism
The range matters: a single issue can move from a Marine's life after service to controlled prairie burns to art that "troubles worship as spectacle." That breadth is the point — the journal treats faith as a lens on human experience, not as a genre with fixed rules.
The mission, in plain terms
Image's stated mission is to foster contemporary art and writing that grapple with "the mystery of being human" by curating, cultivating, convening, and celebrating work exploring religious faith and spiritual questions. Its vision statement frames the journal as "a vibrant thread in the fabric of culture," contributing to mainstream literary and artistic communities by showing that contemporary work invigorated by religious faith is vital rather than marginal.
Two practical consequences follow from that framing:
- It is ecumenical and literary, not doctrinal. The work is selected for artistic quality and honest engagement with belief, doubt, and spiritual questions — not for agreement with a statement of faith.
- It is a community, not just a magazine. The site describes Image as gathering readers, writers, artists, and art-appreciators both in person and online.
How to engage with it
| If you want to… | Do this |
|---|---|
| Read the journal | Subscribe via imagejournal.org/subscribe to get issues delivered |
| Sample it first | Read the free weekly newsletter, ImageUpdate, which features selections from Image and the broader arts-and-faith world |
| Follow specific contributors | Browse issue contents by genre — fiction, poetry, visual art, culture, essay — as listed for Issue 129 |
| Connect with other readers and artists | Look into Image's in-person and online gatherings, which the site describes as part of its community mission |
What to know before subscribing
The site surfaces subscription and purchase paths (the Subscribe link and www.imagejournal.org/subscribe), so access to the quarterly is a paid arrangement rather than an open archive — the newsletter is the free entry point. Pricing, delivery terms, and any login requirements are not specified in the material available here, so check the subscribe page directly for current rates and options.
If your interest is contemporary literature and art that engages faith as a live question, Image is a long-running, well-established venue for exactly that. If you want content tied to a particular tradition or practical religious instruction, this is a different kind of publication.