About

When I was in high school I wanted to be an artist, but a woman in my church told me that art school wasn’t a good place for a young Christian woman to be. Being a new, zealous, and rather naively uninformed convert I opted for a business major at a small Christian college. But when I took an Introduction to Humanities class my freshman year where we read Francis Schaeffer’s book Art and the Bible, it became apparent that the arts were exactly the thing I should be thinking about as a young, creative Christian woman.

This was the beginning of my interest in “theology and the arts” and I never looked back. After graduating with a Biblical Studies and Humanities major, I got married to my best friend Brandon (who I’ve known since 6th grade), moved to Scotland, and completed an M.Litt. and Ph.D at the Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts at the University of St. Andrews.

While living in St. Andrews, my husband and I grew incredibly homesick and because I was writing my Master’s dissertation on Wendell Berry, we couldn’t escape thinking about place– what it is, why it matters, and how to live better within it. To aid our research, we had lots of community dinners, took up quilting, and befriended some lovely folks to help us learn to love the place we were in. When we moved home, we drove the entire length of the UK, sailed to Brooklyn Harbor on a 7-night transatlantic crossing, took a 15 hour Amtrak train down to Atlanta, and then drove another 3 hours home. We wanted to feel the distance and have time to reflect on what it means to be a part of a place–to love it, to leave it, and to make your home again.

Since 2012, I have taught theology and humanities at Point University in West Point, GA where I became Chair of the Humanities Department in 2022. My publications and research can be viewed here, along with all the other academic-y things one might be interested in. My current research continues to engage theology and the visual arts, a theology of beauty, the doctrine of creation, and a theology of placemaking and social justice. Because theology is always a lived reality, these interests have also been expressed in various placemaking practices, including dwelling in a Living-Learning Community with students for two years, renovating a 115 year old mill house, and painting a 900-square-foot children’s mural on the story of creation and redemption.

In 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic, my husband Brandon and I were blessed to have our son, Flint, after 10 years of infertility. In 2022, our daughter Eden arrived as another surprise blessing.