Vanessa Ryerse, a current student in the Master of Arts in Theology & Culture – The Arts program, discusses the process of creating her final project for the Constructive Theology course, taught by Dr. Lauren Sawyer. Vanessa shares insight into her creative journey, offering reflections on her approach and the development of her work. Dr. Lauren Sawyer explains the aim of the course and how Vanessa’s project demonstrated how theology can be constructed through diverse, creative mediums while remaining deeply respectful of tradition and ethically grounded.
An introduction from Dr. Lauren Sawyer
In fall 2024, our Masters of Theology and Culture students participated in TCE 546O: Constructive Theology, a course that introduced students to the particular intricacies of constructive theology–a mode of or orientation toward doing theology–especially alongside systematic and dogmatic theologies. With the help of our course readings, particularly Jason Wyman’s Constructing Constructive Theology, we together built a blueprint for reading and then doing constructive theology.
We highlighted how constructive theology is a way of doing Christian theology that takes tradition seriously while also challenging certain assumptions. Constructive theology is inherently interdisciplinary and concerns itself with the very real issues of today’s world.
The final project for the term invited students to construct a theology, with the option of creating it through artistic means with an accompanying annotated bibliography. It is tempting to think that “good” theology only happens through academic paper-writing. My students, Vanessa Ryerse included, clearly showed how that is a false limitation. Constructing an open, tradition-respectful, ethics-oriented theology can happen in many beautiful ways.
Constructive Theology Assignment by Vanessa Ryerse
As a working mosaic artist, the opportunity to craft a project for our Constructive Theology class was an intuitive and welcome assignment. I create from broken dishes, and I am particularly interested in new meanings emerging from juxtaposition.
In this work, it could be imagined that each piece in the mosaic was a reference to the readings from Constructive Theology class as well as Intersections 1, which is concerned with the question of “What is the self?” There are also many visual call backs to other artists, who build on other work, such as Kehinde Wiley, who suggests religious iconography and Kara Walker, who touches on silhouettes as stereotypes. Jeanne Vaccaro’s work likening trans-bodies to hand-made bodies strongly influenced the project.
The resulting work, playing on the shape of a human shooting target asks the viewer to see God in the most vulnerable, and in one’s enemy, while at the same time interrogating certitude about the way God is known. This shooting target motif is an important addition to my body of work, which I first began to explore in the wake of the El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019, as seen in “Rend And Remember,” a work that will next appear in the show More Clay: the Power of Repetition at the Academy Art Museum in Maryland in the fall of 2025.
About Vanessa
Vanessa Ryerse, an associate board certified chaplain, is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Theology & Culture – The Arts at The Seattle School of Theology & Psychology. She chose the program to enrich and deepen her chaplaincy practice and is grateful for how seamlessly the curriculum integrates with and supports her work in spiritual care.