Repeating a Theme: Beauty as Theology.

March 2013.

The nature of blog writing is episodic.

The theme of this particular blog is spelled out in the name. Religion. Belief. Cosmos. Within the limits of that broad theme, I write following no preconceived outline. Yet what emerges does have something of a flow, following whatever it is that has struck a resonant chord within me these days.

My thoughts weave around the various aisles of thought in these general areas, sometimes influenced by a particular reading I've encountered, sometimes by a dream or a personal encounter or a vision that smacks me in the head.

Leaving Estes Park.

Despite the wandering, my deepest feeling these days is that the notion I'm exploring is the experience of Beauty as a source of spiritual nurturance and nourishment.

Within that context I've been looking generally at the differences between the Roman Catholic and the Protestant Christian religions, pondering whether the Catholic traditions don't aim more at the sublime, at least in intention, than the Protestant, which are explicitly and aggressively bounded by the cognitive and intellectual.

Glenfinnan Viaduct, Scotland.

More specifically, in recent writings I'm returning to the profound and preverbal connection I've long felt for well-designed physical spaces--landscapes, engineered structures, buildings. And that building form that captures the essence of all spirituality, the Cathedral.

Most closely identified with the Catholic tradition, the Cathedral finds its home in those Protestant religions most closely associated with liturgical practice: the Church of England, or as it is known in the United States, the Episcopal Church, and the Lutheran Church.

Ferrell Jenkins tells the story of the Church at Wittenburg.

The irony doesn't escape me that the church named after the instigator of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, is one of the churches most closely aligned with religious practices most similar to those of Catholicism. Nor is it incidental that the doors on which Fr Luther chose to post his 95 Theses were magnificent. (Beauty is not always simple and inexpensive.)

This blog entry occurred to me as a helpful reminder to myself and to any prospective reader who might wander this way: there are themes afoot here.