SONGS:
>> “Ennil Adanga Sthothiram” (எண்ணிடலங்கா ஸ்தோத்திரம்) (Of Many Blessings I Will Sing Forever), performed by Zanbeni and Benny Prasad: On February 10, 2019, at Trinity Worship Center in Chennai, Zanbeni Prasad Odyuo, who is from Nagaland in northeastern India, sang a popular Tamil Christian praise song, accompanied on guitar by her husband, Dr. Benny Prasad. Tamil is not her native language (Lotha is), but she learned the words phonetically and worked with Tamil-speaking friends on pronunciations. The song expresses gratitude for God’s goodness and enjoins all of creation—dwellers on land and in the seas and skies—to praise him. I love this jazz waltz arrangement and Zanbeni’s gorgeous vocals.
>> “Tlotlo le be ho Modimo” (Glory to God in the Highest): A song from the Catholic Mass in the Sesotho language of South Africa, with a Latin refrain taken from Luke 2:14.
Here are the lyrics, with a rough English (auto)translation on the right:
Tlotlo le be ho Molimo
Ea busang maholimong
Khotso e be teng lefatsheng
Ho batho ba lokileng
Re u boka ka thabo
Re phehella thorisong
Gloria! Gloria! in excelsis Deo!
Re ntse re u khumamela
Ka tumelo e phelang
A re rosiseng Molimo
Tebohong e sa feleng
U mohloli e moholo
Ea busang maholimong
Gloria! Gloria! in excelsis Deo!
Jesu mora oa Molimo
U konyana e tlosang
Libe tsa lefatshe lohle
Re batla ho u rata
U re hauhele bohle
Ba llang mona lefatsheng
Gloria! Gloria! in excelsis Deo!
Glory be to God
Who reigns in the heavens
Peace be on earth
To righteous people
We praise you with joy
We pursue praise
Gloria! Gloria! in excelsis Deo!
We continue to worship you
With living faith
Let us praise God
In eternal gratitude
You are a great source
Who reigns in the heavens
Gloria! Gloria! in excelsis Deo!
Jesus, Son of God
You are the Lamb who takes away
The sins of the whole world
We want to love you
You have mercy on all
Who cry here on earth
Gloria! Gloria! in excelsis Deo!
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PRINT INTERVIEW (heavily illustrated!): “The Architecture of Prayer” with Amanda Iglesias, Comment: For his latest Material Mysticism column in Comment magazine, art historian Matthew J. Milliner talks with architect Amanda Iglesias, who curated the traveling exhibition The Architecture of Prayer to showcase the best of contemporary church architecture across a variety of cultures, denominations, and budgets. She discusses traditional versus modernist architecture, the church as the longest and richest of architectural experiments (even today, Christianity remains a generative influence on architecture, she says), examples of churches as conversations with history or as an exegesis of scripture, architecture’s redemptive capacity, why church projects are desirable for an architect, advice for congregations with modest means seeking to work with an architect, advice for those looking to enter the field of architecture, and book recommendations.
The Architecture of Prayer is on display at the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University in Indiana through September 28. (I saw the exhibition last year at Calvin University, and it’s great! Take a virtual walk-through, and view the gallery booklet.) You can follow Iglesias on Instagram @iglesiasproject.
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ARTICLE: “Inuce designs Mountain Church of Julong as ‘more than just a place of worship’” by Tom Ravenscroft, Deezen: The construction of a remarkable new church has recently been completed in Julong, China. It’s the first church in the city, and one of several churches in China designed by the international architecture studio Inuce (including a pink pebbledash church in Fuzhou and a church wrapped in 100,000 panes of stained glass in Luoyuan). “Located at the foot of a mountain surrounded by forest and with views across the town, the Mountain Church of Julong references both the form and representation of an ark,” Ravenscroft writes in the article. Inuce founder Dirk U. Moench told him that “biblical archetypes were fundamental in our design process. . . . As a powerful symbol for shelter and new beginnings, the ark of salvation, safely landed on a foundation of rock, became the crystallisation point for our design.” [HT: Mark Meynell]
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VIDEO PODCAST INTERVIEW: “Dr. David Taylor on Worship, Embodiment, and the Value of Beauty in Church Buildings,” Making Space: Sara Joy Proppe is the founder of Proximity Project, which helps churches discover real estate and placemaking solutions that fit their mission in the neighborhood. Here she presents a recent Barna poll result in which, when asked, “Which do you feel are the most important to having a meaningful experience at a church?,” 64 percent of Christians and 65 percent of non-Christians responded “art and beauty in the building.” She then speaks with liturgical theologian and author W. David O. Taylor on how we’re shaped by the physical spaces we worship in. I appreciate the charitable attitude of Taylor, who is Anglican, toward a variety of Christian traditions and aesthetic expressions, not holding any single one up as the only right way but rather inviting us to consider how our notion of “church” plays out in the buildings we construct and how we use them. The conversation with Taylor starts at the 11:48 timestamp. (There are overlaps with a podcast interview of his that I recommended in 2021.)
“I love church architecture, I love how it can tell the story of God’s creative and recreative work, I love how our bodies are integrally attuned to spaces and can come alive (or go dead) in particular spaces, and I love how architects invite us to pray with our whole beings in order that we might be both re-habituated and re-sensitized to our calling to be Christ’s ‘little tabernacles’ wherever we may go,” Taylor wrote on social media when sharing this interview.
Making Space is a podcast of the Christian research organization Barna Group and the Aspen Group, a church design and construction firm headquartered in Frankfort, Illinois. Learn more at https://www.barna.com/MakingSpace/.
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VISUAL COMMENTARY ON SCRIPTURE: “The Earthly Tent (2 Corinthians 5:1–10)” by Sarah White: For this coming Sunday’s New Testament lectionary reading from Paul’s second letter to the church at Corinth, Sarah White, a visual arts program curator and artist mentor at Morphē Arts, has curated a VCS mini-exhibition of three contemporary artworks that speak obliquely to that text: a performance art piece in a Manhattan cathedral by Eiko Otake; a forest diorama by Alyssa Coffin, meant to be “read” and “seen” through touch; and a giant hand-sewn jute sack sculpture by Ibrahim Mahama, which is draped over buildings. “Internal to this section of 2 Corinthians is a series of accumulating metaphors of architecture, clothing, geography, and time,” White writes. “The dynamics of these allusions are accentuated and shifted as we consider the performance of materials, bodies, and spaces in all three of these artworks.”
For example, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York, Otake articulated both a personal and collective mourning through “the contortions and contractions of her body and face” and “moments of stumbling, falling, and lying down,” evoking Paul’s line about our groaning and longing. Her performance came out of her time as artist in residence at Saint John’s. I’m always intrigued by how artists respond to church spaces and help awaken worshipping communities (and curious publics!) to aspects of God’s story and our own—and I’m thrilled when churches invest in artists’ work. I wish that were more normative.
Art & Theology 