SHOPKEEPER BIO

IMAGE: Art ~ Faith ~ Mystery

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Our new generation of products features Barry Moser's wry, loving portrait of Flannery O'Connor, our unofficial patron saint, who wrote that “In the novelist's case, prophecy is a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up. The prophet is a realist of distances.” A mission statement for Image if we ever heard one.

The 2007 Glen Workshop shirt uses a paraphrase of a line from Graham Greene's incandescent novel The Power and the Glory: “Hatred is just a failure of the imagination.” The back has the logo and theme of this year's Glen, which focuses on art and the imagination as a lens through which to view the three great western faith traditions—and as a means to overpower hate.

Our previous generation of items features Dostoevsky’s mysterious dictum “Beauty will save the world”—which comes from a fragment from his journals and is also a notion he explores in his novel The Idiot. We’ve taken it as a rallying cry for Image’s mission—because we believe that good art can be a wellspring of renewal for religious faith, and in turn, for all of creation. For those who think this statement is theologically incorrect: remember that God in the Western tradition has always been known as the perfect embodiment of Goodness, Truth, and, yes, Beauty.