Architecture as Theology

I take the scholarship of Margaret Barker with a hefty grain of salt. But the freshness in passages like this is undeniable:

The Mosaic tabernacle, and all the temples later built in Jerusalem, represented the creation, divided by a veil into the visible and invisible worlds.  The holy of holies, with the golden chariot throne, was the invisible world of God and the angels.  It was the state of uncreated light.  The veil, woven from four colours to represent the four elements, thus represented matter screening the glory of God from the material world.  The holy of holies was beyond matter, and therefore beyond time, a hidden place, often called eternity.  The great hall of the temple represented the material world, and was the garden of Eden, paradise, with Adam, the human being, as the high priest.  Rituals in the holy of holies were rituals in eternity, and those who entered the holy of holies passed between heaven and earth.  The priests were angels; the high priest was the Lord.

I often point out to my students that the Bible begins (Babel) and ends (New Jerusalem) with architectural criticism.  Barker reminds us that the Bible is centered on architecture as well.  The Bible's extended architectural descriptions are not sidelines.  They are part of the revelation on Sinai, and are properly theological.  To study architecture is therefore to study theology - something that many (most?) architectural historians and theologians are conditioned to overlook.

Urbanism as Icon

Conor Friedersdorf has written of the tyranny of New York, leading to E.D. Kain's defense of the same where he suggests cultural influence is not a zero-sum game.  As a localist (why not?) I am tempted to give the last word on living in Manhattan to Adam Sternbergh's article on the subject, where he quotes an ex-New Yorker living large in Buffalo:  “I don’t miss my old life in New York. I only miss the life in New York I know I never would have had.”

As responses were invited, I'm chiming in from one of the more idyllic urban retreats within striking distance of Manhattan.  Is Princeton actually a city?  According to its chief architect, yes.  Ralph Adams Cram called this town "a walled city against materialism and all its works."  Granted, one might have to concede something to materialism if one hopes to afford living here as a non-student (or even as one).  And this weekend, thanks to reunions, Princeton, according to GQ, is a less a walled city against materialism than a Bacchanalian Hellscape.  But when the hangover fades, one can makes one's way to the University Museum, and get a sense of what Cram was after.

You have until June 6 to see Architecture as Icon (which that link does almost nothing to illuminate). The significance of this exhibition, which I've discussed before, is not easily understood, and even after being understood, is easily underestimated.  The art historian Slobodan Curcic, first trained as an architect, has spent his career studying Byzantine art with an eye for architecture (in addition to advising students like me).  What he began to notice, is that buildings themselves could serve the same metaphysical function as the gold background of an icon - that is, buildings symbolize transcendence, a.k.a. the aboriginal peace of the Godhead.  It's a genuinely new art historical insight that will (we can hope) begin to work its way, via the catalog, into the discipline of art and architectural history at large.  The transcendence of architecture as established by the Byzantine tradition provided (and provides) a warrant for the proximate transcendence of all beautiful architecture.  

The more time one spends with these artifacts, the more one begins to see that not only architecture functions iconically, but the cumulative effect of multiple buildings does as well: The city.  The city and its architecture, the book of Revelation tells us, is a permanent feature of redeemed spiritual life.  Architecture as Icon shows that the Heavenly City is not just an eschatological hope, but the looming backdrop of every new church construction project, and of any manifestation of urban life at its best.

Urbanism, this exhibition suggests, has iconic dimensions.  M. Francis Mannion's article The Church and the City, effectively manages both the idealism and realism latent in this compelling idea:

Babel, Rameses, and Philisita.  Two are cities; the third a pseudo-city.  These three places represent, in different ways, human deprivation in civic configuration: Babel, the city of confusion; Rameses, the city of sin and oppression; Philistia, the pseudo-city of ugliness.  Taken together, they correspond negatively to the theological transcendentals: truth, goodness, and beauty...   Over these three symbolic cities reigns the city that is their radical opposite in all respects: the new and eternal Jerusalem, the city of goodness, truth, and beauty.

To speak with a degree of transcendental bravado that might understandably exclude me from polite discussion, no city should measure itself by the Manhattan or D.C. standard - but all cities, including Manhattan, D.C. and Princeton, should measure themselves by the impossible-to-achieve, downright Blakean, New Jerusalem standard.  Whether or not its residents realize it, the fact that Cram upheld just such a standard for Princeton is a chief (and highly transferable) reason why it is now a desirable place to live.

Manhattan: Distorting Architectural Mirror

I recently had occasion to visit Manhattan via the Staten Island ferry, which almost makes up for the normative Jerseyan gateway to the city.  The church that greets the visitor is the Mother Ann Seton shrine (left), sandwiched between skyscrapers, holding on for dear life.  Entering the nearby Castle Clinton monument, photographs of the expanding New York skyline show an age when steeples once dominated, until they were displaced by monuments to capital.  The tale of churches trying to keep up, be it through skytop chapels or Gothic skyscrapers, is well narrated by Van Leeuwen's The Skyward Trend of Thought, and has since been complemented by two new books on the Woolworth Building and the Trib Tower that I'm dying to get my hands on.  But ultimately, of course, the battle for ecclesial prominence was lost.

Or was it?  As I left Manhattan, I looked across the water to the Brooklyn badlands in the distance, and saw a strange thing: A nearly exact picture of New York of old.  In most North American towns today, it is easily forgotten, steeples still dominate the skyline.

[cross posted at north american churches]

Jonathan Edwards and Byzantine Architecture

The Architecture as Icon exhibit, which was first in Thessaloniki, is now at the Princeton University Art Museum through June 6.  I have a write-up in the Spring 2010 PU Museum Magazine on the relation of the exhibit to Jonathan Edwards.  Sub-division of American Protestantism get acutely possessive about Edwards, but as I've suggested before, his thought constitutes a sort of New World Patristics, containing most permutations of American Christianity in ovo.  It is not, therefore, surprising that the Orthodox/Byzantine dimension fits nicely with Edwards well. Here's the piece:

On first thought, what imaginable connection could there be between the Calvinist history of the College of New Jersey (which became Princeton University in 1896), and an exhibit on the Byzantine architecture as icon?  The mixture of Revivalist sentiment and Reformed doctrine that resulted in a new colonial college in 1746 left little room for an iconic, cosmic, Byzantine worldview, and still less for images and architecture that hoped to mediate that reality.   The Presbyterian accent on the commandment to “make no graven image,” meant that Reformed thought – which would continue with vigor in Princeton with the founding of Princeton Theological Seminary in 1812 – was anything but Byzantine.

A closer look, however, shows that there are important strands within the thought of Jonathan Edwards, arguably Princeton’s most famous philosopher, theologian and president, that nicely dovetail with this exhibition.  Byzantine theology involves a analogical perspective that encompasses both the beauty of the physical world and the history of salvation – a view best encapsulated by the carefully schematized decorative program of the Byzantine church.  Likewise, Jonathan Edwards was preeminently a theologian of beauty, and his notes collected in Images of Divine Things display a typological exploration of the physical world, a world understood to be an icon of the character of God. 

Edwards, upon accepting his position as President of the College of New Jersey in 1757, had planned a magnum opus, which might have fused both the history of Redemption and his iconic perspective on nature into a system that would crown his already prodigious output.  But his untimely death, only six weeks after his arrival in Princeton, meant this cosmic project would go unfinished; nor could such a vision be fulfilled by the less imaginative Presbyterian minds took Edwards’ place.  Still, seeing how well the iconic aspirations of Byzantine architecture embody the late Edwards’ perspective, the current exhibition can perhaps be considered a partial fulfillment of his ambition.   At the very least we can imagine that Edwards, whose body lies buried just a few blocks away, would be intrigued.

At any rate, behold the impressive catalog from wherever you are, and if you're nearby, be sure to visit the exhibition itself.  If the latter, pay special attention to that creepy disembodied voice...  or else.

The New Prometheus

Herewith a nomination for our most hideously vindictive piece of public statuary, the Samuel Rea monument in Manhattan's Penn Station. The 1910 sculpture by Adolph Weinmann is fine enough. What makes it unbearably cruel though, is the backstory.

Samuel Rea had been working for the Pennsylvania Railrod since he was 16. He rose up in the company, and under his Vice-Presidency glorious Old Penn Station was completed in 1910, the crowning achievement of American architectural trinity McKim, Mead and White. Rea's likeness, and that of a previous railroad President Alexander Cassat (brother of painter Mary Cassat), were installed in niches of the newly built architectural wonder. When Rea assumed presidency of the Railroad two years after the station's completion, it was his job to defend this superb American accomplishment from those who called it a wasteful extravagance. Rea succeeded. Visually speaking, we can imagine this was not that hard to do.

But the conceits of architectural modernism combined with the triumph of the automobile (which had supposedly "eclipsed" the train), led inexorably to the destruction of Old Penn Station in 1963, resulting - because trains turned out to be not so outmoded after all - in our freakishly hateful present replacement. The new Penn Station brings certain Bible verses to mind. As Vincent Scully famously remarked, "One entered the city like a god. Now one scuttles in like a rat." Other worthies testify to their extreme dissatisfaction as well, hoping for the success - may it be granted! - of Moynihan Station.

I spend a lot of time at the current Penn Station, and I often see people screaming and fighting, cursing and hitting each other. Would the old terminal have prevented such spiteful behavior? Not necessarily, but I wouldn't rule out the fact that overwhelming grandeur has an ameliorative effect on public behavior. And yet, as disturbing as it may be, there's something appropriate about snubbing one's neighbor in such a hellish setting. New Penn Station makes it feel right to be rude.

Following the destruction of Old Penn Station, the two aformentioned statues were preserved and placed on the new sight. Alexander Cassatt has since been mercifully removed, but not Rea. He is there today, and every day, forced to witness our undoing of his life's work. Once his likeness looked upon Roman grandeur, now it stares at an ATM console. Decades have passed - he cannot look away. Had I the choice between this fate and eagles picking at my regenerating intestines for all time, I'd be on the fence.

The Largest Show on Earth

Ah, movements: Conceived in aesthetic wonder only to calcify into aesthetic ideology. Take MoMA's impressive Bauhaus exhibit. The first room of the show, depicting the early stages of the movement, are a delight. Gerhard Marcks' 1920 triptych, sporting traditional Christian imagery, was completely acceptable alongside a totemic carved airplane propeller depicting a cosmic vision. The artisan/artist barrier was meaningless in the first stages of the Bauhaus, just as it was in the Middle Ages. Painters were required to learn metallurgy and pottery. Klee taught bookbinding! This was quickly abandoned, however, as the distilled essence of pure design - free from the taint of the past - was isolated and then propagated. Architecture took over. The original director, Itten, resigned in frustration, and the Bauhaus (not without Nazi approval) conquered the world. They knew it as Hannes Meyer's Marx-inspired Volkswohnung (people's apartments) that would mercifully provide affordable design for the masses. We know it as Ikea.

The story has been told many times: See Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House (ripe for a re-reading) or Nathan Glazer's From a Cause (Meyer) to a Style (SWPL #79), oft-cited here. Bauhaus shaped chairs, rugs, tables, lamps, tea kettles, even toys and cribs. The hand that makes the cradle rules the world. No one can deny that many of these products are beautifully sleek. I like a Michael Graves teapot as much as the next guy. But the Bauhaus didn't know when to stop, as Ludwig Hilberseimer's chilling cityscapes make plain. Here's Michael J. Lewis on the matter: "The same Cartesian coordinates that are so stimulating when applied to textiles or chess sets take on a rather different aspect when the grid grows larger than the individual, who shrinks into a speck."

Stop what you're doing and look around you. Granted you have a window nearby (but even if you don't), how long does it take to find an object or building influenced by this imperious simplicity of the Bauhaus? This show does not end at the walls of the exhibit, but extends into the Bauhaus structure of the museum itself, and onto the more cheerless of New York skyscrapers, through the low-income housing projects that Bauhaus ideals inspired, and on further into anonymous edge-cities, suburban office parks, and dreary residential realities. The show closes soon, but don't worry if you can't make it. You can't not make it.

Evangelicals and Architecture

Over at the Evangelical Outpost, Tim Bartel points to the faddishness of evangelical cultural engagement:

The problem with Christian fad-mongering and the problem with liberal take-over of the aesthetic realms are the same. This problem lies in the difference between the art that replaces traditional doctrine and values and the art that doctrine and values plan for and protect. The former type of art is predicated on the assumption that aesthetic theory and artistic creation occupy the same cultural space as theology and religious practice, and that because of this, one must make way for the other; there is no room for both.

This is well illustrated in the realm of architecture. Evangelicals like Dick Staub (whose book on culture is really quite good), can in unguarded moments be found lionizing, even fawning over starchitects like Gehry or Libeskind in the name of relevance, instead of forging the kind of countercultural critiques provided by Michael J. Lewis, Philip Bess, or Catesby Leigh. Leigh, for example, articulates the architectural morality tale that Princeton will be telling for the foreseeable future:

It so happens that Princeton University has recently undertaken construction of a new science library designed by Gehry and a residential college in the Collegiate Gothic style (for which Princeton's campus is well known). The latter was designed by Demetri Porphyrios, a member of Prince Charles's circle. Just completed, Whitman College is a large, impressive assemblage of 10 buildings, arranged around two courtyards and housing 500 students. It is built with load-bearing masonry walls, meaning there is no steel or concrete frame to support the floors. The walls boast outer envelopes of fieldstone or limestone. The science library's design, on the other hand, is at least contextual in that it plays off the sharply contrasting scales of the adjacent buildings. It features the familiar twisting metal panels. It is an exercise in inorganic complexity.

Whitman is going to age gracefully as the patina of time enriches the stone. It will also perform very well from a structural standpoint. As a matter of fact, barring some catastrophe, it will be around for hundreds of years. Whitman, in other words, is likely to increase in cultural value over the long term as an asset that enriches Princeton's architectural patrimony. It will be loved. Were it not for the inadequacy of its figurative detail, it would be loved even more. As for the science library, one can only hope it does not leak. Over the longer term, it will not age. It will corrode. Moreover, it will probably peak in cultural value within a relatively narrow time frame. It is, after all, essentially an architectural fashion statement - a manifestation of an architectural theory or sensibility fundamentally conceived in terms of the negation of other theories and sensibilities. It has no normative architectural significance whatsoever: idiosyncracy is the whole point. In sum, it would be surprising if Gehry's library were still standing a century from now, both because of its structural character and because it probably will not be loved in any meaningful sense of the word. Buildings that are loved are much more likely to bear the humanist imprint, regardless of style.

I imagine most Princeton residents already intuit this. If not, they are sure to come around to agreeing when the neon fades. We can hope this long view perspective will catch on with evangelicals, if only because "When the neon fades" sounds like the beginning of a worship song.

The Frankfurt Fool

Adam Kirsch at The New Republic provides a very helpful review of Thomas Wheatland's The Frankfurt School in Exile. According to Kirsch, the book brings an appreciative, but more down-to-earth reading of the revered "fathers of critical theory" (Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Fromm, Horkheimer, etc.). Incidentally, in Seminary instead of "church fathers," we all learned to say "church fathers and mothers." But I suppose that is easier to pull off in church history than with mid-century Marxism. Here's Kirsch:

Wheatland shows how the Institute [for Social Research] came into contact with two important segments of the American Jewish community. The first were the New York Intellectuals, who were in many ways the perfect American counterpart to the Frankfurters: Jewish radical intellectuals with an interest in politics and culture. While the two groups never engaged as deeply as they mightg have - in part, Wheatland shows, due to the Frankfurters' policy of staying aloof from American politics - some relationships did form, and New Yorkers like Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and Nathan Glazer became aware of Critical Theory.

But for Glazer, we might add, the awareness very much deepened, especially regarding Critical Theory's impact on public architecture. In his wonderful book that I continually refer to, From a Cause to a Style, Glazer is judicious about Critical Theory, but also mildly exasperated:

Young students should reach out, try, experiment. Even if the theory that speaks to them is impenetrable to me, they should try to realize the hints and insights and possibilities they divine in it. But when they design and build for the public, one factor affecting what they design must be public response... if the students empathize with the people [they build for], maybe what is necessary is not to critique it but to bring with their designs something they would not find in graceless environment[s]: perhaps humor, perhaps nostalgia, perhaps repose, perhaps even, if one is capable of it, something of beauty

But by the end of the book, the gloves come off. The sons of the fathers of Critical Theory, according to Glazer, soon became

scarcely comprehensible, and the less comprehensible... the more they engaged architects' interests, but in any case they were no longer theories that envisaged the role of the architect as enabling and improving the life of ordinary or run-of-the-mill people and communities, as early modernism did. Despite the influence of quasi- and pseudo-Marxist thinking in these advanced contemporary theories, they had little interest in the improvement of the common social life and the circumstances of the working class or low-income families, or in the social reform that is consistent with some kinds of Marxism. Rather, they showed much more interest in the catastrophism, the apocalyptic character, that is a more important part of Marxism. Theories in favor today among advanced architectural theorists and students are those that emphasize, indeed celebrate, breakdown in society and meaning, often in obscure and contradictory language.

And so, Glazer foolishly sold his birthright as the New York heir to the Frankfurt School for a mess of comprehensible language, concern for the needs of real people, social cohesion, and beauty. What was he thinking?

Building for Humans

Pomo types with an aversion to philosophical modernity might consider transferring their suspicion to architectural modernism as well. This is difficult, because it's not nearly as cool to dislike modernist aesthetics; but for those wishing to press forward nonetheless, I hope to assist you with an article about architectural modernism called "Building for Humans" in the current Christian Century. It's in ye olde printed medium, so ye will have to go the "library" or "newstand" to read it. My beef is not with modernism per se, which no doubt can be beautiful - but with ecclesial modernism, and my ideas are mostly gleaned from Bess and Glazer. Matthew Alderman (of the shrine) was kind enough to offer some of his deliciously non-modern designs for the piece.

update: This article is now available on beliefnet.

Unironic Brooklyn

Francis Morrone, author of some of the best American urban guidebooks, likes cities. In one such book, he describes his move to Brooklyn well before it became white mandate.

What I was unprepared for was the beauty. I'd always fancied myself a connoisseur of cities, one who could see that a dense and aged urban environment could be as beautiful as natural scenery. Yet the Brooklyn I was slowly getting to know was so diversely beautiful, so clearly the product of successive ideals of the good city (however failed many of these visions ultimately proved to be), that I became a Brooklyn addict.

The addiction lead to Morrone's interest in the legacy of the City Beautiful movement at the turn of the last century, "that efflorescence of civic art that for me marks the highest stage of American urbanisim." Then he gets a bit angry.

Seldom is the City Beautiful written about without some studied academic distance, which is in itself no bad thing, except that today academics tend to view the American past through the lenses of irony, sarcasm, disdain, or a kind of (generally perfectly irrelevant) quasi-Marxism. I am tired of irony, sarcasm, disdain, and quasi-Marxism. I am tired, above all, of the prevailing sense, particularly among academics, that we view the past from a privileged perspective. We do not know more than the men and women of 1900 knew. I long to know what they knew, however impossible that dream may be.

I haven't read that kind of historiographical spirit and verve since Rachel Fulton's FJTP (see pages 2-3 and 470). Morrone's rejection of irony enables his Brooklyn guidebook to transcend whititude. Pay heed, Park Slope.

Old York

Why do we love New York? Because, according to this fine book by Nathan Glazer, "its most recognizable icons predate the rise of high modernism in architecture and design." In other words, because it's not new.

"New York is still, compared to Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, San Diego, cities that are new and growing faster, the old city. And in an age when things change so fast, that exerts some fascination."

And make no mistake, the old buildings didn't survive by accident. Thirty seconds of studying the tenets architectural modernity is sufficient to pick up on its patronizing disdain for the past.

The disdain demands resistance, and one of the reasons Glazer's insights are so nourishing is because he provided it - and not merely in a classroom. His was one of the prominent voices that protested the (now universally lamented) destruction of Old Pennsylvania Station in 1964. The failure of that protest means that the New Jerseyan's welcome to New York is no longer this, but, well... this.

There is, however, a bright side: "It was such vandalism, effected or proposed, that expanded the preservation movement and made it a power." And so Old Penn Station can be considered an architectural martyr that laid down its life for its friends.

Can we expect anything like it in the future? I'll let Glazer explain:

"Not only would it embarrass architects to design decorative detail or call for it; they wouldn't know how to do it, and there would be no craftsman to provide it. The workmen who once carved and sculpted what seems like acres of decorated surface simply don't exist."

You'll pardon me if I continue to turn to Glazer for my architectural and urban criticism instead of to the theorati.

5 points on architecture

1. The Gates of Paradise at the Met, according to Maureen Mullarkey, have become "doors to nowhere."

Severed from their purposes as sacred architecture, Ghiberti's panels are on tour as capital assets, pay-per-view spectacles in a techno-secular world.

If you haven't yet become acquainted with one of our finest writers on art (perhaps because she's an artist) you can keep up here. Mullarkey was well ahead of the New Republic's general diagnosis on contemporary art: that it's now money. When The New Republic and Crisis agree, someone's onto something.

2. The frequent Seinfeld shot of Tom's Restaurant, to my knowledge, never panned back to show the Cathedral that looms over it just a few blocks away. Sadly however, Ralph Adams Cram's greatest ambition has become, due to a 2001 fire, his ugliest church. I shant soon forget what it was like to walk the largest Cathedral expanse in the world through a 10x10 foot gopher tunnel. I could tell you a lot of stories about St. John the Divine (as could many others), but I'll leave it to a photographic essay. Use the "slideshow" feature. You too might be surprised to learn what the Cathedral is "in service to." Speaking of which, since when did St. Paul's Chapel become a permanent memorial?

3. How do you end a Gothic Revival? According to Michael J. Lewis (in his phenomenal book on the subject), you do so by abandoning Puginian principle, applying Gothic to commercial structures like the early 20th century's Woolworth Building in New York.

The identification of Gothic architecture with Christianity, so assiduously and lovingly championed by Pugin, had dissolved, leaving only a residue of vapid spiritual associations which lingered in such names as "Cathedral of Commerce" or the "Cathedral of Learning."

Enter modernity.

4. Then there's postmodern (now post-postmodern) architecture. How to explain? Try watching this constellation of starchitects gathered to give envious homage to Peter Eisenman. Then sit down with Philip Bess' essay on Eisenman. Or try the reverse. First read Nathan Glazer's straightforward statement that

Architecture in recent years has turned away from the pragmatic social and behavioral sciences to the wilder reaches of critical theory because its early efforts to design better housing turned into a failure.

Then watch the video and hear someone discuss about how architecture is now "beyond building."

5. Perhaps one of the reason tourists are generally despised is because their wide-eyed wonder is something locals have usually lost. Princeton historical society tours (I just took one) help in the recovery of such wonder. What a town. The Tour de Princeton is growing (more to come). The town in a word? Revival. Not only a Revival School, but Dutch Revival, Tudor Revival, Romanesque Revival, Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, and yes, Renaissance Sculptural Revival. To my embarrassment, I've never actually looked at this gorgeous thing at the convergence of 206 and Nassau. MacMonnies toiled in the fields of figural sculpture until a bird flew in. Fly away now, birdie.

Finally, do send your best photos to our North American Churches flickr group. It's growing every day.

Philip Bess in Princeton

Protestants, I'm afraid it fair to say, either don't engage the secular academic world, or "engage" it by slowly, often quickly, capitulating to its premises. One could argue this is because Protestantism has jettisoned the theological resources necessary for proper engagement, such as the analogia entis and virtue ethics. By forsaking the first, Protestants may please themselves with their internal consistency, but they lose the perspective that permits a distinctly Christian book to begin by suggesting, "I have started with an argument from natural rather than supernatural premises." As to the second, virtue ethics permits someone to make charitable sense of the gifts of their secular peers, enabling a book's dedication to a colleague, "who in seeking goodness and beauty also seeks God."

While many Christians in academia can be found fueling today's fragmentation ethos, other wryly resist it, declaring "I am obviously not uninterested in comprehensive narratives, most especially true ones." Why is it so rare to see a Christian academic who, rather than cutting a deal, just cuts to the chase?

Architecture schools today are largely though not exclusively divided between embracing critical theory and embracing sustainability as the ideological "next best thing." In some instances, critical theory presents itself (usually implicitly, but always ironically) as the best foundation for sustainability; and sustainability in turn sometimes presents itself as a kind of critical theory. Critical theory, however, by its own logic - e.g., its views of the primacy of the will-to-power, and of the "constructedness" of nature - is notoriously poor soil for a theory of sustainability or, for that matter, of a just social pluralism, each of which is arguably better grounded in traditional Western religious views of the created character of man and nature and their relationship to each other and to God.

Perhaps other Christian academics don't write paragraphs like that for fear - a legitimate one - of earning the disdain of their colleagues. And Philip Bess, the author of all the above quotations, admits as much:

My allegiance to [the Aristotelian-Thomist] tradition - my happy participation in and defense of the religious and metaphysical realism of Western culture - makes me in most schools of architecture today practically unemployable, and almost certainly untenurable.

Yet Bess did recently find a place as Director of Graduate Studies at Notre Dame's School of Architecture. If you're in town, he's coming to Princeton this Monday October 22nd, and will be giving a talk at 5pm in Murray Dodge.

Of course, there are Protestants who would protest my dim portrayal of Protestant academic engagement, insisting that one can have a properly mitigated analogia entis, virtue ethics, etc. while remaining Protestant - and thank God for them. Fortunately, our era of "plate-sharing" ecumenism permits a Protestant to do just that, leading perhaps to more courageous academic engagement. I have not read The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, which is apparently an excellent book. I was, however, amused by a Stanley Hauerwas quip I once overheard in relation to it, which serves as a playful chastisement to Christians in academe: "Not nearly outrageous enough!"