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Gregory Wolfe is publisher and editor of what Annie Dillard calls "one of the best journals on the planet," Image journal. Wolfe is also writer-in-residence at Seattle Pacific University, and author and editor of a number of books including Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography, Sacred Passion: The Art of William Schickel and his latest collection of editorial statements from Image called, Intruding Upon the Timeless: Meditations on Art, Faith, and Mystery.

Wolfe has published essays, reviews, and articles in numerous journals, including Commonweal, First Things, National Review, Crisis, Modern Age, and New Oxford Review. He was educated as a political conservative, but Wolfe's love for literature led him to pursue an M.A. in English literature from Oxford University before founding Image in 1989.

You talk about some of the standards that were set for Image journal: aesthetic excellence, the public square, and a place where those who are settled in their religious faith and struggling with religious faith would find a home. What is the importance of putting all that together?

We looked very carefully at past efforts in this area, and we were very disheartened by the temptation of many Christians to create what I would call a subculture, and to create a Christian ghetto where there is some separate track of publishing companies and record labels, which have some good housekeeping stamp of approval on them. The danger of that realm of safety is that people are not challenged to live up to their highest, not pushed towards the bleeding edge of life and experience and artistic excellence. Preaching to the choir becomes the name of the game.

As far as the whole issue of those who are more settled in their faith and those who I call grapplers—I use the word grappler because I think the word seeker has been so trivialized that it's almost a meaningless term. Grappler to me is somebody who is in some serious, agonized engagement with faith, and therefore they're not just using faith in their works of literature as background wallpaper, they're using it as the central means by which to come to grips with the meaning of life.

We wanted a balance where people could come together in a forum, those who had found peace and some identity within the faith, and those who were still not quite there.

You have a chapter in which you describe yourself as a conscientious objector in the culture war. How do you take culture seriously and remain a conscientious objector to the culture war?

I try to make clear in that piece that I don't consider that the issues over which the battles are fought are of no interest. They're of profound interest. But what bothers me about the whole culture war as a phenomenon within the church and within the larger public square is that politics has a way of sucking the oxygen out of the atmosphere, of becoming an all-encompassing phenomenon, and becoming more ideological. Faith is not about ideology, it's not about us versus them. It's often looking for the good in others and trying to build on that. And art is good at doing this. We have become so obsessed by the us versus them mentality that it has made our minds more dumb, more crude, more monolithic at a time when we need to be more subtle, more nuanced, more aware of just how complicated the world is.

Ultimately, culture, the stories that we tell, the symbols that we are moved by, shapes politics. Politics lives off of culture. But if it becomes so all encompassing that it starts to dry out and poison the cultural base, in the end there'll be nothing to fight over.

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March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48