The constructive center of my work.
My research asks how Christian doctrine can be thought constructively through encounters with aesthetics, hermeneutics, human making, and contemporary culture.
What does aesthetics change about the way theology thinks?
My work in theological aesthetics begins with questions of perception: how something becomes present, what it means to encounter rather than possess an object, and how beauty, image, metaphor, and form can generate knowledge. Beginning with Eberhard Jüngel and modern German theology, this research increasingly develops toward a systematic account of revelation in which aesthetics is not simply one subject within theology, but a way of reconsidering how theological knowledge itself occurs.
What does the human impulse to build reveal about what it means to be human?
Architecture provides a distinctive meeting place between theological anthropology and material practice. My research asks how buildings express understandings of human agency, embodiment, nature, community, and transcendence—and how built environments, in turn, act upon those who inhabit them. At the center of this work is the concept of exocentricity: the human capacity to stand beyond what is given, imagine possibilities, and intentionally give those possibilities material form.
What happens when language belongs not only to our speech about God, but to the being of God?
My research in hermeneutical theology explores the relationship between language, metaphor, interpretation, and divine ontology. Eberhard Jüngel remains an important point of departure, but this work reaches backward to Augustine and Bonaventure and outward toward modern and contemporary accounts of revelation and language. Its central concern is whether interpretation is merely something human beings do when speaking about God—or whether the dynamics of expression, communication, and interpretation belong more fundamentally to theology's account of God himself.
What might theology discover when it allows cultural objects to set the terms of the conversation?
Music, painting, tattoos, whisky, and other cultural forms appear throughout my work not simply as illustrations of theological ideas but as objects capable of generating theological questions of their own. This research is particularly interested in theological play: the freedom created when inherited ideas, images, and practices are moved into unfamiliar contexts, rearranged, and allowed to disclose possibilities that conventional theological discourse might otherwise overlook.