arts and culture on Image

In the age of the spectacle, image is our identity, and our identity is unavoidably molded by our media.

We are masters at creating an image, but we are novices at recognizing and repenting of the image we have created.

Tennis superstar Andre Agassi was only nineteen years old when he starred in a television commercial for Canon cameras. The spot featured him in all sorts of eye-grabbing poses, a spectacle on display...

We live in a culture where image is everything and substance nothing. We live in a culture where a new beginning is far more attractive than a long follow-through. Images are important. Beginnings are...

Being made in God’s image is also about God’s purposes in the world (God through us). In order to understand how image is connected with purpose, we need to understand a common practice in the ancient...

The value of a US hundred-dollar bill is not based on where it has been or how it has been used. Its value is not determined by its shape, size, or color. A one-dollar bill in American currency has th...

I look at a person as an image bearer of a holy God and I am not in any way spooked by whatever worldly identity that happens to be attached to that image bearer.

When God is seen clothed in flesh, and conversing with men, I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned to i...

The human heart bends toward what the eye sees. Today’s image makers fling into the world's digital spectacles of sex, wealth, power, and popularity. Those images get inside us, shape us, and form...

Each of us, Lord, has failed to fully observe your beauty. We fall in love with our own image and are left disappointed and alone. Please be faithful to us, Jesus, even when we turn from You. We...

To image God is to work and rest as God worked and rested.

“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”

“Whatever his weight in pounds and ounces, he always seems bigger because of his bounces.”

What people revere, they resemble, either for ruin or restoration.

We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties.

At one point in his life, the famous modern artist Pablo Picasso was robbed in his French home. He told the police he would be happy to paint them a picture of the robbers. “And on the strength of tha...

Things Are Different: You never know the story By the cover of the book. You can’t tell what a dinner’s like By simply looking at the cook. It’s something everybody needs to know Way down deep inside ...

A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses the quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which ...

If I take care of my character, my reputation will take care of me.

Adolescents have been offered a license to post without any accompanying ethical framework. Is it fair to blame teens for misusing tools that didn’t exist in our childhood? If I had been given a phone...

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.

In a surprisingly honest confession, the millennial writer Veronica Rae Saron shared this interesting fact in her 2016 article for Medium: Conversation after conversation, it has become more and mor...

Nahum Sarna writes in Understanding Genesis: Perhaps nowhere is the contrast between the mythological and the Israelite conceptions more striking and more illuminating than in their respective descr...

Epithets can chip away at the image of God in us. Name-calling and identity theft are felonious offenses against divinity and humanity. Blasphemy. Those of us who have been victims of identity theft o...

A study led by Brigham Young University found that 96 percent of girls and 87 percent of boys had interacted with Disney princesses by age four. Girls who engaged the most with princess culture (via m...

If we are to be God’s image-bearers with regard to creation, then we will carry on his pattern of work. His world is not hostile, so that it needs to be beaten down like an enemy. Rather, its potentia...

Pop psychology is wrong when it tells you to look inside yourself and find your value. The magazines are wrong when they suggest you are only as good as you are thin, muscular, pimple-free, or perfume...

Think of an ancient icon of Christ. Imagine that a thousand-year-old Christ Pantocrator painted on a wooden panel is discovered in some forgotten monastery. The image of Christ is there, but it’s cove...

Gracious God, again we thank you for creating us in your image. Today, we are reminded that your image is not captured fully in the solitary individual but also and necessarily in human community. In ...

The grace of Christ is never deserved but always intentional. Receive this grace, intended for you and me—it has our names on it–this all-sufficient grace that turns our weakness, which has our names ...