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. 

I started blogging a few years ago before I really had an idea of why I was blogging.  I wanted to put something out there that connected my name with the type of work I was doing: explorations of theology, ethics, art, and how they affect communities.  But I was too focused on particular goals within my life to really focus on how to extend this thought to a broader public.  Since my previous post, I took my qualifying exams for the PhD in Religion at Claremont Graduate University.  My exam areas (well, most of them) relate to the work I do here and in the academy: Theological Aesthetics, Moral Agency, Religion in Public Life, and Gadamer's Philosophical Hermeneutics.  I also the proposal for my dissertation and started writing my dissertation.  That work has involved some research trips and presentations of papers at various conferences and meetings.  And finally, I've also been working as a writing tutor and teaching assistant.

But now I've started to look at the big picture again.  I started thinking about the world I would like to see and how I can be a part of creating it.  I do believe that it is our job to re-create the fallen world, making improvements bit by bit, and that God inspires us and helps us to do this work. (I thank the late Colin Gunton for that insight.)  Engaging in dialogue on Muse Creative is part of that work.  I want to become a more public scholar.  Through our conversations, we will teach each other about the importance of the arts and architecture, how they relate to faith (particularly my own, a Protestant Christian tradition), and how they relate to the ways communities interact with each other and perceive each other.

Thank you for joining me on this journey.  I look forward to sharing it with you!