The Given World

This is an ongoing project committed to resisting what G.K. Chesterton called “a small and cramped eternity”—that profane vision of Christianity as somehow limited to what happens on a Sunday morning, rather than a vision-shattering insight into reality itself.

I spend most of my day sitting at a computer—an unfathomable device made up of components from all over the world. When I go out of the house, I get into a vehicle and travel along roads made of asphalt in urban developments infinitely removed from what had been—until the last century—the accumulated outcome of millennia of slow ecological change. I eat food that I do not know the source of, grown in places I have never been, harvested by people I do not know and then brought here via a supply chain too complex to be fathomed. I am surrounded by these sites of dislocation. Dislocation from what? From the created world.

I am a creature. Really, everything that I see is a creature; however, much of that creatureliness has been occluded. This occlusion destabilizes and unmoors me, casting me afloat into a sea of abstraction.