About this Blog

I'm writing this blog as a kind of an artists journal to chronicle the process of developing liturgical art for the season of epiphany in the context of my home church, Akron Christian Reformed Church.

I'm not a seasoned artist: apart from being a writer and amateur filmmaker, I may not even have any credentials for even trying to make art for a community. On the other hand, the people at Akrac (as it sometimes called) are a generous supportive bunch, and it was at several members prompting that I took up this project.

I'm also really unqualified to write about the experience with an authoritative tone, so if you're looking for a guide to making liturgical art or a primer in developing liturgical art, you should stop reading right away. Family members and a few friends expressed some interest in knowing more about this project, so I write partly for them.

I also write, because I tend to think about things better as I express them. I'm partly writing this record so I have a more fully formed memory of what happened.

The third reason I write is because, as a part-time scholar (it's my day job), I've been convinced by Ernest Boyer (one of the freshest voices to talk about the work of being a university professor in the last century) that scholarship should not be constituted by the field it is written into, but should be constituted by a set of shared processes and assumptions that are applied in a variety of different situations toward a variety of different types of audiences. He pioneered notions like "the scholarship of teaching," the "scholarship of service-learning," and the "scholarship of translation" to try to move away from the hegemony of the more traditional "scholarship of discovery."

(I realize that a few of you readers are about to check out...WAIT! Come Back! I promise not to say "hegemony" again.)

So I'm attempting to transform this artistic experience into something that might be participate in a larger community talking about liturgical art and all different kinds of art-that-functions-for-community. I honestly don't know who those readers might be yet. I will tell you about some of the writers and artists who started to develop my thinking about liturgical art, but in the meanwhile the internet seems like a good place to start this yammering. The likelihood that the googlebots will find my voice and direct me toward likeminded souls -- seems stronger here than in any other medium or forum...

Are you still reading? In that case you must be related to me. Because this is inappropriately long-winded and maybe more than a little narcissistic. I'll try to curb that in the future.

One more caveat? I want to be forthright about the fact that THIS is the first post I'm writing, but I am going to exploit bloggers time-machine capability to develop this blog in a way that reads more chronologically than it's actually been written.