Friends scatter grace through the ins and outs of weeks. And this friend, in particular, had been full of those daily graces that infuse joy into the routine of daily living. How do you say goodbye to a friend like that?
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Even though I didn’t set out to be a nomad, I’ve lived most of my life overseas. After spending time in Italy, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Canada, I landed in Turkey with my family where we lived for fourteen years. I write about travel, art, faith, Scripture, and the relationship between Christianity and culture.
Surviving the Visual Tsunami: A response to Mark Galli
Yesterday the arresting question, “Can we survive the visual tsunami?” showed up in my Twitter feed. The tinge of apocalyptic concern in the title of Mark Galli’s meditation for Christianity Today got my attention. Tsunami sounds bad. But for me, a designer who loves the arts, visual sounds good. I respect Mark Galli tremendously and…
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For the Time Being: Thoughts on Auden’s Christmas Oratorio
Five years ago I read W.H. Auden’s Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, for the first time. I’ve found myself drawn to it during Advent every year since. His psychological insights into the players that populate the narrative breathe life into a story that often feels too familiar to fully appreciate. But it’s his meditation…
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Veneration is not Humiliation: A Theological Interpretation of the Mosaic over the Imperial Door of the Hagia Sophia
“If one called this day the beginning and day of Orthodoxy (lest I say something excessive), one would not be far wrong. For though the time is short since the pride of the iconoclastic heresy has been reduced to ashes, and true religion has spread its light to the ends of the world, fired like…
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The Sower and the Seed—Stained Glass
Jesus’s parable of the sower and the seed lends itself so readily to visual interpretation. This stained glass window design was commissioned by Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for the Ray I. Riley Alumni Center and is suspended from a glass atrium. It’s lit by one of the most brilliant light sources possible—the Texas sun.
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Damien Hirst: Facing Death, Searching for Life
When I saw the Damien Hirst retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London, I had only known Hirst’s work from headlines. My impression from a few poor reproductions was that he was all about death. The retrospective told me that I had been, well, dead wrong. He has a lot to say about life and…
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Designing in color
“Color is a shivering, glorious, active thing, a sympathy of poles founded on an exact kind of wavelength repulsion. Color is cagey, only partially knowable; it resists us even as it beckons. Thus the foundation of its perverse charm.” —Jude Stewart in ROY G. BIV: An Exceedingly Surprising Book about Color This is a business…
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Summer peaches
One warm summer morning I painted these three peaches sitting on the rickety rail of our back patio. They were perfectly ripe, at their peak juicy deliciousness, and fairly glowed in the sun. I’ve always admired the way that Cezanne was able to capture the weight of objects in his still life paintings. When I…
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Alice Neel: Painting as Encounter
Alice Neel was eighty years old when she resumed painting a self-portrait she had begun some four years earlier. In it she leans attentively forward, one eyebrow raised in critical assessment of her subject, glasses perched on her nose as if to sharpen her clarity of vision. She wields her paintbrush as a suggestion that…
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Tina Boesch 