A bridge between religion and the arts: image editor Gregory Wolfe talks about the mission of his magazine

The year 1989 was an important one for cultural change, said Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion--and not just because that's the year when Image began. That was the year the Berlin Wall came down, the year when "a lot of people made comments about Marxism having finally kicked the bucket." About the same time, people acknowledged the decline in Sigmund Freud's influence, said Mr. Wolfe, particularly Freud's notion that religion is by definition wish-fulfillment or escapism.

Before that ideological shift, Mr. Wolfe, 48, had perceived that a lot of modern artistic types were skeptical about religion, because, as he said, "if art is ... meaningful, it has to be about reality. It has to tell the truth." And if religion was not true, as Freud claimed, why should artists have anything to do with it? On the other hand, the church had been suspicious of the arts in the modern era.

Mr. Wolfe, who credits literature as one of the things that led him to become a Catholic, hadn't agreed with either side.

"I had reacted against the pre-'89 triumphalism of both sides, the ... secularists saying that no one was going to write about God anymore and ... the notion that Western civilization as a creative force had died somewhere in the past," Mr. Wolfe said. With Image, he said, "I wanted to prove both sides wrong. I wanted to attack that sort of religious Gnostic attitude, that ... the whole world was so tainted, so poisoned by whatever modernity was that was bad, and I wanted to say to the secularists that artists and writers like Dante and Bach and Rembrandt and Flannery O'Connor were still capable of emerging in the present moment."

In the late 1980s, Mr. Wolfe said, he was talking with his wife, Suzanne, and other friends about these questions. They knew there must be writers out there who were capable of creating brilliant literature that engaged with faith.

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"Each of us had a writer or an artist or two that we liked, and we began asking around," Mr. Wolfe said. They thought at first they might find enough contemporary artists for "four or five issues."

Today, Image is still going strong. Though early issues were infrequent, by 1994 there was enough money to make it a regularly published quarterly. In addition to the editor, the journal now has two other full-time staff members, Mary Kenagy, the managing editor, and Julie Mullens, the director of programs. Together, they produce Image in an office at Seattle Pacific University--a huge step from its beginnings, when it was produced in Mr. Wolfe's basement.

In recent years, author Annie Dillard has called Image "one of the best journals on the planet." Material from Image has been selected for "Best of the Year" anthologies: The Best American Poetry, The Best American Essays, The Best American Short Stories. From the first issue, the staff put great emphasis on the journal's production values, wanting it to stand up to better-known magazines on newsstand shelves.

"We sometimes joked, 'aesthetics before God,' you know, that Image has to be first-rate art, that faith is not a shortcut to anything," Mr. Wolfe said.

Each issue is almost like a thin paperback book. Image offers fiction, poetry, essays, interviews with artists and writers, book reviews and beautifully reproduced visual art, all with some connection to the Judeo-Christian faith tradition. The past issue, for Fall 2007, includes a conversation with theologian Walter Brueggemann and the visual art of British sculptor Stephen Cox. Other issues in the recent past have included interviews with Alice McDermott, whose novel about an Irish Catholic family, Charming Billy, won the National Book Award; and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright, whose most recent collection is God's Silence.

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The editorial advisory board of this once-startup journal now reads like a "Who's Who" of artists and writers working today who engage with the realm of faith; among the names are Annie Dillard, Richard Rodriguez, Kathleen Norris, Patricia Hampl, Paul Mariani, Ron Hansen, Barry Moser. Denise Levertov was on the board, too, before her death.

"My argument--which is hardly original to me; T.S. Eliot makes it brilliantly, probably better than anybody else--is that unless you are engaged with the art of your own time, that is, the art that is in dialogue with the tradition, you can't have access to that tradition in a true, living way because it becomes real as people in current circumstances struggle to make it real," he said.

Growing up, Mr. Wolfe edited everything from his junior high school literary magazine on mimeograph paper to college publications. His father was involved in the conservative movement from the early 1950s, and the son spent his undergraduate years in the late 1970s at Hillsdale College in Michigan, a place he calls a "mecca of political conservatism."