Wrapped in Light

What's been done and what comes next

Looking Back

“How was your sabbatical?” my kind friends ask. Those who know that academic sabbaticals are misnamed semesters of not-working in one area so you can very-much-work in another add on, “Did you finish everything that you wanted?”

They know me well. My tendency is to weigh my worth in word counts, to calculate my satisfaction via completed checklists.

And I did have a big goal. The news is now officially out: I have a contract with Brazos Press for my next book, coming summer 2026! This book considers five visual stories we’ve told about women in the West, and five counter-stories we could have been telling all along. It’s a significant project—and one that feels so tender and weighty all at one. So my fall was full of researching, reading, and drafting, drafting, drafting.

But—as I remind my students even now—we are culture makers, not large language models that scrape and spit. And I wanted to resist the urge to measure my days according to arbitrary markers of productivity. I needed a practice of delight.

One of art history’s gifts to me has been the discipline of looking, of giving sustained attention to the material world. Thus, even as I analyzed artworks, picking them apart while locating them within weblike histories, I wanted to continue that fundamental practice of looking. I wanted to chase beauty down and commit to it, to say, “Yes, I found you” to the glimmering light and oblique shadow and dense texture.

So I took a photograph—and printed it—every day of my leave. These aren’t “memory” photographs, meant to document moments. These are “attention” photographs, cataloguing the visual forms that arrested me.

Most of the time I used my phone; sometimes I grabbed my bigger camera. I printed them as little Instax Mini prints, without perfect color calibration or the weight of archival paper. As my little paper folders of images steadily grew, patterns began to emerge.

I look for puddles of light, for negative spaces, for yellow, of course, but also wine and coral. I find circles satisfying. I want visual echoes. I’m curious to see what other trails will emerge as I play with the resulting images. You can see all 127 photographs in rapid succession over on Instagram.

What are you paying attention to in this new year?

Looking Ahead

I’m excited about some of the spaces I’ll get to teach in this year! Perhaps you or a friend might be interested in joining us.

• February 5-7, 2025, Calvin University Worship Symposium, Grand Rapids, Michigan // I’ll be leading workshops February 6 at 9:00am (Redeeming Vision) and 2:30pm (Art and Spiritual Formation) and learning from artists, theologians, writers, and especially musicians in the meantime.

• February 11, 2025, Contemporary Art as/in Pilgrimage, New York, New York, a one-day symposium from the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art // I’m excited to hear from the very brilliant Kathryn Barush and to lead participants in a practice of intentional looking and movement at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Contemplative Color Walking goes to a conference!

• March 21-23, 2025, The Breath and the Clay, Winston-Salem, North Carolina // I’ve wanted to go to this conference for years, and now I finally get to and I get to talk about one of my favorite contemporary artworks. The vision for this conference is stunning. Please join us.

• March 31-April 1, 2025, Illuminate at Southern Adventist University, Collegedale, Tennessee (near Chattanooga) // John Hendrix! Ned Bustard! Russ Ramsey! Doug Mcelvey! Mary McCampbell!

• More coming soon…