St. Paul's Episcopal Church - St. Joseph, Michigan

08/27/2026

Art in the Christian Tradition - "The Burning Bush” by Annette Gandy Fortt

Annette Gandy Fortt is a printmaker and painter who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. Her work reflects her surroundings and the people who inhabit them. It is also deeply influenced by her Christian spiritual moorings. After twenty-nine years working as an artist while also teaching in the public schools of Memphis, New York and Northern Maryland, she has retired to focus on her craft. Presently Annette is working on a series of pieces in pastel that were inspired by her trip to Ghana in 2007.Since receiving her Master of Fine Arts degree at New York’s Pratt Institute in 1981, Annette has shown widely in invitational, solo and juried shows in the New York and Washington DC metropolitan areas. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections.” Learn more at https://annettefortt.com/

08/20/2026

Art in the Christian Tradition -
"Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter" by Berthel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844)
Berthel Thorvalsen is one of Denmark’s most well-known and successful artists of the 19th century. He worked most of his life in Italy as a sculptor, running a successful workshop in Rome. Among his work is the tomb for Pope Pius VII, he only commissioned work by a non-Roman-Catholic in St. Peter’s Basilica. A museum featuring his work was build in Copenhagen while Thorvaldsen was still alive.

The art in our post today is actually a sketch for a relief commissioned in 1818 and executed for the altar in the chapel in the Villa Poggio Reale near Florence. The composition was at first done in pencil while most of the silhouettes of the figures have been inked in later. Jesus’ gesture shows that he is at the same time busy handing the keys to St Peter and is preoccupied with the Apostles in general. A couple of sheep in the middle of the scene allude to Jesus as shepherd and to the role of the Apostles in the further work of the Church.

Learn more at https://www.thorvaldsensmuseum.dk/en

08/13/2026

Psalm 133 - When Kindred Live Together
An enticing glow radiates from the interior of this weathered thatched cottage, its warm color picked up again in the orange-streaked sky at dusk. Our eye is drawn to the homely figure of a woman entering one of the two doorways, inviting us to imagine the cozy scene inside.
Reading the painting through the lens of Psalm 133, one can see something of the beauty and simplicity of community life that so captivated Vincent van Gogh. It is one in a series of studies of farm cottages in Hoogeveen in the Netherlands, which Van Gogh visited in 1885. Writing to his brother Theo, Van Gogh described the cottages as ‘four little human nests’—a description which suggests he thought of them as symbols of comfort, shelter, and unity (Van Gogh 1885, #418). The cottage represented here houses two families, as suggested by the two front doors and the shared split chimney. Van Gogh likened it to an elderly couple, ‘worn with age, who have grown into one being and are seen leaning on each other’ (Van Gogh 1885, #410).
The three short verses of Psalm 133 provide a meditation on the goodness and blessing of kindred living together in unity. It is possible that the wisdom saying in verse 1 originally emerged in the family home, although its context in the psalm allows the interpretation of ‘kindred’ to include all those in the family of faith. The psalm forms part of a collection called the ‘Songs of Ascents’, originally sung by pilgrims journeying to the Temple in Jerusalem. Images of family life are woven throughout these psalms (e.g. 122:8; 127:3–5; 128:3, 6; 131:2), fostering in the pilgrims’ imaginations a picture of corporate identity. The cottage in Van Gogh’s painting captures this sense of blessing, and—even amidst poor and harsh living conditions—of the goodness and peacefulness one can find in community.
Commentary by Allison Gray (The Visual Commentary on Scripture - https://thevcs.org)
Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Vincent_van_Gogh_-_The_cottage_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=index&utm_content=original

08/06/2026

Art in the Christian Tradition Peter Walking on Water. Mary Jane Miller

"Faith unleashes the supernatural. We can live on a boat for security or on the waters of faith where we might drown. The gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John, all record Peter and Jesus walking on the water. Peter asked. “If it is you, tell me to come to you on the water." He acknowledges Jesus has bent the law of nature and calls to him before the other disciples. He wants to walk or go to Jesus regardless of the distance or the fact Jesus is standing on the water. In the story, Jesus commands Peter to “come” to Him on the water. Peter took one step in faith to get out of the boat and onto the water. Peter did not experience the supernatural power of God that allowed him to walk on water until he trusted in what he saw as something impossible. Peter was distracted by fear and the thinking mind. He lost his trust in what was happening and reverted back to what he could understand. We become less when we cleave to the physical world as if it is the only reality. With just a little faith, we are capable of greater wisdom, love, trust, and mystery, and so become able to open ourselves to every potential for God's unscientific presence."

Narrative Icon Collection The collection of 12 narrated biblical event and feast days are taken from Mary Jane Miller's book Life in Christ 2021, Knowledge of God made visible in Jesus the Man.
Mary Jane Miller is a self-taught Byzantine style iconographer with over 28 years of experience, born in New York and living in Mexico full time. Her collections of sacred art are contemporary, with a proficient command of egg tempera. The work is extraordinarily rich in style and has been exhibited in museums and churches in both the United States and Mexico. As an author, Miller blends historical content and personal insights to arrive at contemporary conclusions about faith. Her six self-published books include Icon Painting Revealed, Mary in iconography, In Light of Women, and Life in Christ and The Stations. Miller has been published online and in publications such as Divine Temple, Russian Orthodox Journal, Faith and Forum Magazine, Liturgy Today and Profiles of Catholicism. She teaches 4 courses annually, 5-day immersion workshops throughout the US and Mexico. Website: https://www.millericons.com/, https://sanmiguelicons.com/

08/02/2026

07/30/2026

Art in the Christian Tradition – Jacob Wrestling the Angel
The ‘vision’ of Paul Gauguin’s painting is not literal, but spiritual. In a letter to Vincent van Gogh (September 1888), Gauguin points to the disproportionate smallness of the cow and the wrestlers in relation to the spectators. Such disproportionality signals, he explains, that the scene is taking place in the women's imaginations. And the women do not need physical organs to see a struggle in the imagination. In their encounter with the place named Peniel/Penuel (from the Hebrew panim, face and el, God)—so-called because there Jacob saw God face to face—the eyes of all would-be spectators are closed or obscured from us.
There is one notable exception. One woman, in what is almost the center of the canvas, leans forward and gazes raptly at the battling figures, as if absorbed in the imaginary spectacle of human–divine contest. If this struggle is imaginary, what exactly does she see? Is she some kind of Doubting Thomas, attempting to assess divinity with her own senses? What kind of struggle to see is the gazing woman engaged in? The gazing woman’s size and centrality emphasize the significance of her presence. She shifts our sense of what we are engaged in as we view this scene, making us more aware of the possibilities and the limits of our seeing. As we stare open-eyed at this scene of divine encounter, she is like us, or we are like her. The gazing woman perhaps stands in for us in the painting, figuring for us our own struggle to see.
‘What does [Jacob’s] combat matter’, a phenomenologist asks, ‘if it cannot take place this very night?’ (Chrétien 2003: 8). Through the figure of the gazing woman, Gauguin’s painting invites the viewer into Jacob’s struggle with a partner identified as both a man (Genesis 32:24, 25) and the divine (v.28, implied in v.30), an ambiguity resolved in later texts that call the figure an angel (Hosea 12:4). The victory the text commends to us is to prevail, not by defeating God or God’s messengers, but by meeting the divine face to face, with our own eyes—to refuse, like Jacob holding the angel, like the woman holding her gaze, to let go until we have received our blessing.
Natalie Carnes. 2020. 'The One Who Won’t Let Go' , in The Visual Commentary on Scripture ed. by Ben Quash. (London: The Visual Commentary on Scripture Foundation). [Accessed 30.7.2026]
https://thevcs.org/jacob-wrestling-angel -who-wont-let-go

07/23/2026

Art in the Christian Tradition - The Hidden Treasure by The Life of Jesus Mafa — A set of African illustrations of the Gospel

Vie de Jesus Mafa (Life of Jesus Mafa) was an initiative undertaken in the 1970s to help teach the gospel in Northern Cameroon. French Catholic missionary François Vidil worked with Mafa Christian communities in Cameroon to create an enormous catalogue of paintings depicting the life of Jesus as an African man. The Life of Jesus Mafa became a collection of 63 pictures from the life and teaching of Jesus, viewed by the artist as if the events had taken place in a village in Cameroon. The collection has been a resource that helped Mafa people to teach from the Bible in a way that connects with their community. Millions of these images have been printed and distributed around the world since their creation in the 1970s.

Image: https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48286

07/16/2026

Art in the Christian Tradition - Jacob’s Ladder by William Blake

William Blake’s use of ink and watercolor in this painting from 1800 creates a dream-like effect, as the watery materials evoke the fluidity of Jacob’s sleeping vision. We are presented with a tonal gradient: color-contrast decreases, along with detail, as we look from bottom to top. In the lower half of the watercolor, the star-filled sky is dark but as our eyes ascend upwards, light fills the space, illuminating an awe-inspiring scene of wonder.
Jacob lies at the bottom in an awkward sleeping pose; indeed, one can imagine that getting comfortable would have been difficult in the wilderness with nothing but a stone for a pillow. Nonetheless Jacob is rendered in a deep and peaceful state of slumber. The vision of the spiral staircase appears from behind him, growing out of the stone on which he lays his head. Blake signals a spiritual encounter by his positioning of Jacob’s right foot, which protrudes into the dark, starry space beyond the edge of the earth on which he is lying. The composition leaves the viewer asking, where does the finite end and infinity begin?
The progressive recession of the spiral staircase suggests a vast distance. It seems that the stairs curl away into the sun and beyond to eternity. The lack of any structural integrity to the staircase asserts its unreality, allowing the spiral shape simply to evoke the power and energy of God’s promise (Cook 1914: 407).
The looseness of the drawing’s pencil lines emphasizes the immediacy of the work. The angels (some with and some without wings) descend and ascend the stairway, wafting and curving their bodies in ways that mirror the curling stairs. The ethereal quality of Blake’s painting means that just as this vision appeared out of nowhere, we can easily imagine it disappearing again, leaving us, along with Jacob, dumbfounded, ready to proclaim the ground that he is sleeping on as a sacred space: ‘How awesome is this place!’ (Genesis 28:17).
Commentary by Anna Freeman Bentley (https://thevcs.org/jacobs-ladder -curls)
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blake_jacobsladder.jpg

07/14/2026

Mark your calendars to see the South Bend Cubs play on August 23rd at 2:05 EST.

Stephen Leonard from St. Augustine's is organizing a group outing to include St. Paul's, St. Augustine's, and the Church of the Mediator. At St. Paul’s, a sign-up sheet is located on the bulletin board in the church hallway. Please sign-up no later than August 10th if you plan to go.

We need a commitment of at least 15 people in order to secure a group fee, which includes a hotdog, chips, and a drink.