Featured Articles Archive

For every issue we publish, Faith & Form features one article here on our website. As each new issue is distributed, our home page is updated with the latest featured article. Previously posted articles will remain on the website and will be accessible from this page. Our online article archive goes back to 2006.

Light, Wood, Water, Steel

Works by Shim-Sutcliffe Architects A core question can shape an entire creative practice. Behind the work of the Canadian architecture firm Shim-Sutcliffe Architects stands the question, “Is there a place for nature and the culture of the local within the … [continue]

Mausoleum as Mnemonic Device

A cemetery does not just contain the remains of the dead. It also aids the memory of those who remain alive; it is a kind of physical mnemonic device that helps us remember those who have passed away, with names and dates carved in headstones or on columbaria … [continue]

2012 International Awards Program for Religious Art & Architecture

The 2012 Religious Art and Architecture Awards Jury, left to right: Rolf Rohn (liturgical design consultant); Susan Jones (architect); Erling Hope (artist); Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (architect and jury chair); W. Joseph Mann (clergy).

The first thing that stands out about this year’s award winners is the number of projects cited in the categories of restoration and renovation. Typically, only a handful of such projects has been awarded. For example, between 2005 and 2011, the average number … [continue]

Old Friends in New Places

Architect and client reflect on making a new worship space on a Quaker school campus. Sidwell Friends School, a K-12 Quaker school in Washington, D.C., recently transformed a 1950s gymnasium into a contemplative space for worship, with additional facilities … [continue]

Light Leaps

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The theologians state that God shines forth to us more clearly in the symbolism of light, since we ascend to intelligible things by means of perceptible things. Surely, Light itself, which is God, is prior to any other light, howsoever nameable, and is prior … [continue]

Landscape Meditation

The Won Dharma Center is a 30,000-square-foot meditation and spiritual retreat in Claverack, New York for a Korean Buddhist sect that emphasizes balance in daily life with a focus on nature. The retreat site is a 500-acre property on a hill with views west to … [continue]

Blessed are the Laid Back

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How the Emergent Church Movement is Questioning Mainline Religion As members of the “Y” or Echo Generation, born in the 1980s and early 1990s, my age group spent our youth witnessing the rise of the religious right. Megachurches blossomed across the country … [continue]

Adding to Wright

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Adding to a National Historic Landmark on the National Register of Historic Places would be intimidating enough for your average architect. But to design an addition to such a building that was also designed by Frank Lloyd Wright really cranks up the anxiety … [continue]

Color and Light

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For centuries, those of faith have admired the stained and art glass windows in houses of worship. The changing daylight streams through the glass, shifting colors and bringing life to the windows’ figures and forms while projecting plays of color and light … [continue]

Threads of Spirit

While concrete and wood may be relatively foreign materials to many, everyone has a relationship to fabric. It is, after all, the most intimate environment that we have. Upon entering the world, leaving the protection of a mother’s womb, the newborn is … [continue]