In last week’s post, I reflected on the connection between creativity, creation, and sustainability. I argued that, in my own practice, learning to make with clay has helped me become more aware of the gift of creatureliness—what I described through the lens of Trinitarian theology as shared participation in God’s ongoing creative work.

This week, I want to explore another theological cornerstone: the Incarnation. If the Trinity gives us a cosmic frame for ecological and creative participation, the Incarnation grounds it in the concrete, the vulnerable, the material, and the finite.

But first, a note on theological method—and an image from my childhood.

Theology and the Tuning Key

When I was growing up, my middle sister Diana was a drummer. A good one. As the youngest and the only sibling still at home, I was dragged all over the Midwest to jazz festivals, marching band competitions, and drum shops in Omaha. I logged hours in the backseat of the family car outside her lessons in Council Bluffs. Along the way, I learned more about drumming than I ever did about softball (or how to avoid being the little sibling who got picked on).

Eventually, I started messing around with her old kit in the basement and even joined the middle school band for a few years (sorry, Mom). One thing I picked up—besides the basic beat—was the importance of tuning the drumhead. You use a small tool called a key to tighten the lugs in a particular order. If one side is overtightened, the whole drum sounds off. A good drum tone depends on balance.

I sometimes tell my students that theology is like tuning a drum. What we say about God affects what we say about humanity. What we say about sin shapes what we say about grace. When a theological system is coherent—when it holds tension well—it can really sing.

And one of the most delicate tensions in Christian theology has to do with how we understand the material world: the body, the physical, the created. One side of the tradition—asceticism, apocalyptic detachment, and the Pauline contrast between flesh and spirit—emphasizes renunciation. Jesus tells us not to worry about what we wear. He tells the rich to give everything away. There’s a spiritual discipline in refusing to cling too tightly to the things of this world.

But that’s only part of the drumhead.

Matter Matters

The deeper theological claim of Christianity is that creation is good. That the material world is not a trap or illusion or enemy of the spirit—but the very medium of God’s self-revelation. This is why the early church so fiercely rejected docetism, the heresy that claimed Christ only appeared to be human. The Greek word dokein means “to seem.” For docetists, the Incarnation was a kind of divine illusion—God putting on a flesh-costume.

But the church insisted otherwise. Christ is not God in disguise. He is fully human and fully divine. The Council of Chalcedon, in 451 CE, gave us the language we still use: one person in two natures, without confusion, change, division, or separation.

The “anastasis” icon represents an embodied Christ, descending into Hell to rescue the fallen

Why does that matter for a theology of making?

Because the Incarnation affirms that the material world matters—not just as a stage for spiritual drama, but as a site of divine presence. God doesn’t hover over the world. God enters it. Sleeps. Bleeds. Eats. Dies. Rises. Jesus shares in the full scope of what it means to be flesh.

The Incarnation is not just about divine empathy—it is divine entanglement. As Elizabeth Johnson and Cynthia Moe-Lobeda have argued in different ways, the Incarnation is an ecological event: a declaration that the created world is worthy of divine participation.

Against the Virtual

I grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, camped out on the shag carpet of our living room, eyes inches from the enormous faux-wood console television. We had four channels, including PBS. If I lingered too long, my mom would tell me my “eyes would get square,” and send me outside. So I’d dig in the garden, run through cornfields, and get into the kind of mischief Iowa farm boys specialize in.

If my eyes weren’t square then, they’re surely headed that way now. Most of my days are spent staring at a computer screen, writing. The rest? Staring at my phone.

In my work on technology, I often reference Albert Borgmann’s concept of the device paradigm—the idea that modern technology aims to become frictionless, invisible, backgrounded. The enormous wooden TV console of my childhood looked like a piece of furniture, a sideboard with speakers and maybe a hidden bottle of something. Now the same function is performed by a flat screen mounted on the wall functioning like a window or a mirror. It no longer takes up space. It no longer resists.

This disappearance of materiality—what UX designers celebrate as “seamlessness”—has theological consequences. In the 1990s, people spoke of the “virtual world” as if it were a separate place. But it isn’t. There is nothing virtual about server farms, lithium mines, or the fossil fuels powering our devices. The internet is not a weightless idea—it is a material system with a material cost. Even the worst online trolls are real people (as much as I hate to admit it!).

To call it “virtual” is to flirt with a new kind of docetism. A heresy of disembodiment.

The Clay and the Flesh

This is why I think making with clay matters. Because it grounds us—literally. It returns us to the texture of the world. It resists the temptation to live in abstraction. It reminds us that we are part of a material cosmos, one God has not abandoned but entered.

When I teach fabricandi divina, I tell students that clay has a memory. It resists too much haste. It collapses when forced. It rewards presence, attention, humility. And in all of this, it becomes—if we let it—a practice of incarnation. A form of theology with our hands.

To make something, to shape it slowly, to participate in transformation without control—this is not just art or craft or therapy. It’s discipleship. It’s a form of praise.

In the next post, I’ll reflect more fully on how this theology of presence and materiality shapes a sacramental imagination—how ordinary things like water, oil, bread, and wine might reveal to us the extraordinary presence of the God who still takes on flesh.