How Architecture Got Ahold of Me

A recent campaign by Architecture for Humanity inspired me to remember why I love architecture.  I love architecture most for the emotions it can illicit, the potential of new technologies it possesses to improve human life, and the amount of human effort and artistry that goes into it.

The Vision behind My Work

I’ve been thinking about my vision, mission, and all of those other things great leaders do to define their purpose. My vision isn’t like most corporate visions; it’s about what kind of world I’d like to see.  One professor of mine, Monica A. Coleman, refers to it as an eschatological vision.  This site, Creating the Future, refers to a vision as “the future you want to create for the community you wish to impact.” This is mine:

My vision is a Christian community that understands the theological importance of the arts and culture, critically participates in its production and consumption, and comes to understand architecture as significant cultural influence on human relationships and activity.

Return to the Blogosphere

After a few years absence,  I have decided to resume my blogging activities on the Muse Creative website.  I am a contributor at the Feminism and Religion blog, and the experience building my skills there provoked me to return here in addition to my ongoing posts on that blog.  I'm in the process of updating this site’s design and doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work to ensure that I can provide my readers with great content. 

Moral Agency

I've been more than a little slack in writing blog entries, so I thought I'd share the latest academic piece I have been writing.

I've been really interested in issues of moral agency lately.  Who do we consider to be someone who has the capacity to act morally?  How do we describe the criteria for moral action?  Do our models exclude experiences of some people because of race and gender?  Well, because I've been auditing a course on moral agency and taking a course for credit on race, gender and politics, I wrote a paper for Race Gender Politics class that I would have written for Moral Agency, if I were obligated to do the assignments. 

An Artful, Soulful Way of Living

I was thinking the other day about how art can impact life, wondering how art really, practically helps people in a difficult time. One of the first thoughts that came to my mind is how the blues helps me get over the blues. There's something about expressing yourself: reaching into your pain, and belting it out that helps a hurting soul. 

The Synthetic Task of a Theologian (My Work as Scholar)

As a theologian, artist and ethicist, I work in the space where ethics and aesthetics converge in public life. I examine ethical systems based on aesthetic constructions: imagery, visions, narratives, models and metaphors; I also examine aesthetic constructions that reveal or rely on religious and theological bases. My work as a scholar is to synthesize work in the separate, but interconnected fields of theology, ethics, and aesthetics and construct theologies of culture from them.

The Synthetic Task (My Artist’s Statement)

Design communicates values. Cohesion between the intellectual, spiritual and physical aspects of an architectural design can evoke a powerful sense of place. My work addresses these connections. I draw from diverse fields of study to assess, redesign, and create architectural spaces as reflections of the spiritual experiences they seek to affirm.

As an architectural designer and theologian, my mediums are metaphor, abstraction, color and texture. My designs communicate through the shaping of space in a modernist and expressionist aesthetic that demonstrates function and the interplay of human relationships in direct immediacy. I create architectural forms, but I also express my ideas through illustrations and collages, proclamation of Biblical and literary texts and the composition of essay and memoir. My work articulates a community's unique narrative: the identity of its past, present and future. I critically engage and then express the unexamined, the unspoken and the unheard not through conflict, but through an intentional process of reflection, dialogue and collaboration. In our physical and metaphoric landscape of division and disjointed space, my task is synthetic: to heal and to reconcile.