05/27/2026
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In a time of discontinuous change, where any image you can imagine (and many beyond imagination) can be realistically created by AI, is there anything you would risk carving in stone? 🗿📰
Visitors from around the world who stop by to see First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh are struck by its breathtaking twin spires. In any city, churches usually have the most interesting architecture. Church buildings lift up neighborhoods by just being there. Even people with no religious faith are inspired. ✨
Visitors who look closer sometimes notice an interesting detail: Sunday worship times are carved in stone. One wrote, “When that building was built, the congregation imagined that people would flock to that place in the middle of the city forever; so they built it grandly. They may have imagined that the rhythms of church life would be so uncontested for time immemorial that they could risk carving the hours of Sunday worship prominently in stone in the church’s façade.”
Again, is there anything you would risk carving in stone? Visitors to First Presbyterian Church notice something else, a stone pulpit looking out over the sidewalk, with a great stained-glass window behind it. Visitors are left to wonder that maybe there really is a God, and that God might not be done with them yet.
If there is anything in life that doesn’t change, it just might be God’s word. That word isn’t just cooped up inside a great old stone church, but, as the pulpit suggests, it’s loose in the world.🙏🙌
