I had thought that when I turned 60 I would have fewer questions about life and more answers. But the exact opposite has happened. As my own mortality looms closer on the horizon of life, my field of vision has expanded the boundaries of life’s meaning and stretched me further than I could imagine. At…
what is seeing dakota?
In this installation, we bring together the artistic process and works of a visual artist with the reflections of a theologian to cultivate imaginative and possibly transformative ways of seeing and interpreting the world around us. We intertwine not only two differ-ent professional practices of art and theology but also our two different ways of seeing Dakota. Our hope is that you who are seeing this installation will see Dakota in a new manner. We invite people to look with intention, to ponder the images and words, and to gather insight from the art and words.
selected works
Spirit(ual) Direction: life with dog
After we buried the ashes of St. Benedict’s Wilfrid, our 10-year-old Airedale Terrier, I was horrified to see our new puppy, a 10-week-old Goldendoodle, digging up the ashes and rolling in them. What at one moment I found disturbing, the next moment I found rather amusing if not fitting. In the strangest of ways, I…
Perichoresis: A Choreography of Friendship
When they run and play, the three dogs know exactly how to move in a synchronized dance of delight. Brindle, a gray Standard Poodle, leaps with a lightness to her being as she bounds across the field. As the youngest of the dogs, she can outrun and outplay both of her senior male dog friends….
Fences
Two summers ago, while participating in the annual bike trip Ride Across South Dakota (RASDAK), I spent long minutes looking at fences. South Dakota fences. Which are sometimes different from and sometimes similar to the lodgepole pine fences I helped build in my youth in Montana. Those fences were made of trees we found up…
Veneration of Smell: St. Christina (1150-1224) The Astonishing and Byron the Doodle
I’m relieved that St. Christina the Astonishing isn’t officially venerated as a saint by the current Roman Catholic Church. While she has inspired many Christians by the austere practices of her faith, I believe her sense of smell is what left her out of the official canon of saints. At an early age her parents…
Hiawatha
On a hazy summer morning, Sheila and I drive 30 miles to the east end of Canton, South Dakota to see a fence. The fence in the distance holds one of South Dakota’s most painful secrets. Located between the fourth and fifth holes of the Hiawatha Golf Course, the fence surrounds a cemetery where 121…