What Shape is your Altar?
Encouraging and enabling a community to gather around the altar table.
architecture
Architecture Shapes Us
How liturgical space works, how gesture, vesture, movement, and so forth impact the reality of worship, possibly far more than getting the text just right.
Architecture Affects The Soul
The long-overdue plan is out for more than 120 new homes set to be built in Christchurch’s East Frame. This is inner-city living one block away from Cathedral Square. I am distressed and sorely disappointed. We may be about to create a future housing disaster in the centre of our city. Expressed most strongly: Fletcher
Our Buildings Shape Us
Someone recently sent me an article with the title “One in six young people are Christian as visits to church buildings inspire them to convert” about a study that indicates that for young people a visit to a cathedral or church building has been more significant in their decision to become a Christian than, say,
Different is Better?
This is a blog post about worship. I promise. Read on. I have watched recordings of the TV programme The New Zealand Home. There is an unquestioned, articulated doctrine that having an area of houses where all share a similar style, a similar look, is undesirable. We see this doctrine at work in the Christchurch
Around God’s Table
The language we use, the words we choose, form lenses for the reality we are talking about. At the Sacra Liturgia conference in London on Tuesday last week, Cardinal Robert Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, asked that priests begin presiding at the Eucharist ad orientem, that
Looking East and West
Pope Francis has been making waves. The Orthodox are trying to catch up with our new context. And some people are trying to turn back the clock. Looking East or West? Cardinal Robert Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments has asked that priests begin presiding at the
Architecture Affects My Soul
Above are two of the new central-city buildings going up in post-quake Christchurch – the city whose plan was that we be a “city in a garden“. Even if “soul” is a metaphor for you, I posit that our physical environment affects us. Steel, glass, tilt-slab, reinforced concrete, and the occasional planter box, with hardly