October 2010
Volume 37 Number 8

One cross

Purchase & Download This Issue
(PDF format), $6

ON THE COVER: Station 11 of "Fourteen Stations" by Rob Macdonnell, installed at St. Jerome's Church, Brampton, Ontario. See all 14 stations at www.desmarais-robitaille.com.

I recently received a message from a reader inquiring about the reasoning behind last month’s cover (37:7, September 2010). He was rather agitated, demanding to know whose “bright idea” it was to use an image of a church in which there was an obvious clash of cultures. It seemed to him that the church building had been constructed or renovated recently, but then the parish received a new, conservative pastor who layered a more traditional style on top of the existing space. He may have been surprised with my reply. I said that I was glad that he had written to share his thoughts, because his reaction is part of what I was trying to evoke with that cover. What he (and others) may not have realized is that every cover this year (except for May’s architecture issue) has featured a cross. That symbol, that sacrifice, unites us. Everything else is interpretive. The worship space this reader reacted so strongly to was clearly imagined and designed with a relatively progressive worship style in mind. Something happened to put a conservative spin on it, with what appears to be not much concern for the impact this would have on the space. There was probably little concern for the people as well. It illustrates well the question of “what is church?” that we are grappling with in each issue this year. That photo capturing two interpretations of what church should be struggling for dominance in one worship space with the cross of Christ suspended over it all made quite a point, I thought. (More)