Intruding Upon the Timeless: Meditations on Art, Faith and Mystery

Over the last two decades, a quiet revolution has been taking place in our culture. In both the church and the public square, people are turning away from partisan politics and shrill ideologies and looking for social and personal renewal through the imagination—and, more specifically, the imaginative space where religious faith and artistic vision meet. In short, they are seeking ways to reconnect beauty to goodness and truth.

One of the forces helping to spearhead this cultural revolution has been Image: A Journal of the Arts & Religion, the premier publication devoted to showcasing original creative work—fiction, poetry, visual art, music and more—by Christian and Jewish artists at work today. Image, which has received accolades from both the professional art world and the religious community, has published not only Nobel and Pulitzer prize winners but also a whole generation of emerging artists.

Intruding Upon the Timeless: Meditations on Art, Faith, and Mystery is a collection of Gregory Wolfe's editorial statements that preface each issue of Image. These short, evocative essays constitute a new Christian aesthetic for our time. Each of the meditations is like a polished gem: radiant, gracefully written, beautiful in itself, but also serving as a stimulus to further reflection. They remind us of the way that both faith and imagination reach beyond the limits of reason to intuit the mystery of redemption.

We recommend ordering this title through Hearts and Minds or IMAGE.

Gregory Wolfe’s vision is the animating force behind Image, one of the best journals on the planet. Intruding Upon the Timeless, a collection of his pieces from Image, takes its title from a phrase of Flannery O’Connor. That’s apt, because not since O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners has there been such bracing insight on the pile-up where art and faith collide. This book will rev your engines and propel you down the same road.
—Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

"A collection of brief essays by the editor of Image, a distinguished journal of religion and the arts. A nice mix of the whimsical, prococative, and devout, as befits the variegated subject." —First Things

"I found myself stopping periodically as I read, staying with particular phrases (and contemplating the striking woodcuts that illstrate the book), sometimes hauling the words out of context for my own meditations, and finally (and very appropriately) being moved to incorporate the fruits of my meditations into my own poetry. I can only imagine that Gregory Wolfe would be deeply pleased to know that as an author, as well as a publisher and patron of the arts, he is contributing to our ongoing works of creation." —Anglican Theological Review

I’ve long been a big fan of Greg Wolfe’s editorials in Image and I’m thrilled to find them all collected in one volume. Nobody does a better job of reconciling and synthesizing art and religion than Wolfe. His brilliant insight into the spiritual is founded on his understanding that artists and preachers are asking the same questions about the universe. Intruding Upon the Timeless is an essential book for anyone who perceives—as Jesus did—that storytelling is the primary mode of understanding the infinite.
—Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from A Strange Mountain

“To rave about this book is easy. To commend it to one and all— secular seeker, liberal Protestant, devout Catholic, culturally-sensitive evangelical — is a sure thing. It really is that appealing. . . . this is good, good stuff. It is, I am sure, a glimpse of the Kingdom of God. Buy [Intruding Upon the Timeless] and give them out like medicinal tablets to those sick at heart of the emptiness of both the pornographic postmodern nihilism which surrounds much modern art and the sentimental shallowness of what passes for art in most Christian merchandising stores.” (click here to read entire review) —Byron Borger, Hearts and Minds Books

"Far from being preachy or doctrinaire, Wolfe's elegant prose is a joy to read and savor; his provocative, illuminating essays fully engage the mind." —From a review by Booklist

Gregory Wolfe’s reflections from his editor’s chair are much more: they are spiritual essays. For, with a prose as fine and sharp as a surgeon’s knife, Wolfe manages, over and over, to cut very close to the soul.
—Richard Rodriguez, author of Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligation

In an age that has been facilely identified as secularized or post-Christian, Gregory Wolfe was among the first to perceive instead a renaissance of religious humanism in the arts: of writers and artists who did not abandon their faith in Mystery but drew courage, guidance, and inspiration from it. The trenchant and erudite short essays of Intruding Upon the Timeless serve as a stirring introduction to that popular but rather subterranean movement, and establish Gregory Wolfe as one of the most incisive and persuasive voices of our generation.
—Ron Hansen, author of Mariette in Ecstasy and Atticus

For nearly two decades, Gregory Wolfe has kept a keen eye on the increasingly busy crossroads of art and religion in America; his initiating and ongoing insight has led to a wealth of significant accomplishment, but the most sustained (on his part) and sustaining (in the service of countless others) has been his shepherding of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion. While these editorial essays can serve, most readily, as documents of recent literary and art history, recording the surprising renewal of substantive religious thought in both, we would do well to bear in mind that each has served, in its turn, as initiating, encouraging, visionary impulse for much of what it both describes and brings into being.
—Scott Cairns, author of Philokalia: New and Selected Poems

“thoughts. . . so penetrating they cut as deep as broken glass” —Books & Culture