Essays, articles, chapters, criticism, and occasional pieces across theology, art, architecture, music, and culture.
Selected work across systematic theology, aesthetics, architecture, visual art, music, and contemporary culture.
Cult, Worship, and the Kingdom of God in Wolfhart Pannenberg
Pannenberg and the World · International Pannenberg Series · Karl Alber Publishing
What happens when worship is understood not simply as remembrance, but as anticipation? This chapter examines the place of festival and cult in Wolfhart Pannenberg’s theology, arguing that worship provides a provisional experience of the coming Kingdom of God. Festival suspends the ordinary structures of time and social life, allowing the future promised by Christian eschatology to become present in fragmentary form. The result brings Pannenberg’s ecclesiology into conversation with questions of play, temporality, and the anticipatory character of Christian existence.
SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY · ESCHATOLOGY · ECCLESIOLOGY
The Forsakenness of God: Suffering, Memorial, and Existential Strife in Post-War Stations of the Cross
Stations of the Cross · Libreria Editrice Vaticana
What becomes of the Stations of the Cross after the catastrophes of the twentieth century? This chapter examines post-war artists who transformed the traditional devotional sequence into a form capable of bearing historical suffering, memorial, and existential uncertainty. Particular attention falls on works in which the Stations move beyond conventional ecclesial settings and familiar narrative forms, exposing the cry of abandonment—Lema sabachthani?—as a question directed not only toward Christ’s suffering, but toward the apparent absence of God within modern experience.
THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS · VISUAL ART · SUFFERING
Reflections on Ultimate Concern in Paul Tillich & Kendrick Lamar
Transpositions
What makes something sacred? Bringing Paul Tillich’s account of “ultimate concern” into conversation with Kendrick Lamar, this essay considers the possibility that religious depth can emerge within cultural forms that resist any easy distinction between sacred and secular. Rather than searching popular music for illustrations of theological ideas, it asks how music can create its own spaces of ultimacy—places in which questions of identity, judgment, desire, violence, hope, and transcendence become difficult to avoid.
THEOLOGY · MUSIC · CULTURE
The Rupture of Sketch in Gordon Matta-Clark
Drawing Matter
A drawn line appears to add something to the page. But it also cuts across what was there before. Beginning with a sketch by Gordon Matta-Clark, this essay approaches drawing as an act of rupture: the point marks a displacement of the surface, while the line extends that disturbance across it. In conversation with theories of the point, line, movement, and spatial practice, the sketch becomes less a representation of an architectural intervention than an intervention in its own right—a small act of making through disruption.
DRAWING · VISUAL ART · SPACE
Dom Hans van der Laan on Culture and Sacrament in Architecture
Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture · 29.4
Dom Hans van der Laan’s architecture begins from a peculiar relationship between the world human beings receive and the forms they create within it. This article reads his architectural theory through liturgy and play, asking how the freedom of human making can remain responsive to the created world rather than simply imposing itself upon it. Architecture emerges as a cultural act in which material, proportion, perception, and human agency are brought into relation—and, in doing so, opens a way of thinking about the sacramental possibilities of built form.
THEOLOGY · ARCHITECTURE · SACRAMENTALITY
St Andrews Encyclopedia of Theology
What does it mean to describe theology as hermeneutical? This essay introduces a theological tradition in which interpretation is not merely a method applied to biblical texts but a more fundamental feature of Christian thought. Tracing the relationship between revelation, language, history, metaphor, and understanding, it examines how hermeneutical theology develops from modern philosophy and Protestant theology into a distinctive account of how God becomes intelligible. The essay also considers the possibility that hermeneutics concerns not only human knowledge of God, but theology’s account of divine communication itself.
SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY · HERMENEUTICS · LANGUAGE