Etherchapel

 This is a website/project I've been building on since 06.  It attempts to start doing with the web (and other materials) something akin to what the monks, masons, illuminators, and other builders did with what they had.

At it's simplest level - I'm just trying to make a quiet and beautiful space for God's grace to work.. But.. alongside and via a complex one.  One in which the web is developed as an icon to God (a lens and a lifeline),  rather than left to rot as an idol (hell's own mirror and scourge). 

Etherchapel as a visual sanctuary

Housing all, is something like a little romanesque abbey that I've been modeling. With it and its surroundings - courtyard gardens - sanctuary - ambulatory and side chapels I'm trying to image something..  So hopefully,  like all religious art, alongside (and via) the semi-beautiful imagery there's something deeper mysteriously communicated.
 Above this is a hidden layer of website that I call the devotions drawer.
At first I imagined and formed the visual walls merely to hold out the noise of the rest of the web, the drawer to hold traditional devotions digitized. It is at these two things that it works best, but E' is more..
Etherchapel tries to

• find some of the web's intrinsic (sacramental?)  potential that we've neglected (and the enemy uses to corrosive purposes)
•   use the artistic/theological traditions of the church as inspiration and jumping off points (icons, illuminated breviaries, devotionals, shrines, chapels, cathedrals, and cultures)
• provide for some of the needs in the church that I see
•  and, regardless of temporal success (for some of what I've looks really half-baked), start building at the foot of the altar again.

It's gone through three or four itterations, so I hesitate to write about how it will look/function whenever you get around to roaming through, but It's always had two or three sides:

•  Sanctuary - I've always tremendously admired what the artisans of their day did with parchment, beam, lintel, stone, arch, household and culture.   That last one especially. Even in and of this vale of tears medieval workers polished something other-worldly. So I've been trying to make a quiet place for grace to sink roots and grow, untwisting, setting-apart, and offering the humble bits of networked-graphical-information-presentation.  At first it was just a little one-room chapel and thus ether-chapel.  It has sprawled somewhat into something like a Romanesque monastery and its surroundings.  I like to cool down my eyeballs and soul by parking at the entrance for awhile before heading in.  It's hard for me to get anything out of exploring its nooks (most of which are still just on my computer's drawing board) but I had hoped that others would enjoy wandering, picking a favorite spot and opening up the devotional drawer .. 
• Nursery - Just what is the web (and other modern materials + opportunities) good for?  Pre-suppposing that every thing's job is to bring us closer to God in some unique way, it remains our job to figure out what those ways are.  For instance, parchment and pigment's first uses weren't as fliers, mass-mailings and other trash can liners, but capturing and incarnating the most important of ideas..  Thus illuminated bibles and breviaries.  With the web (a more potent but analogous medium) whole new salvific possibilities open up.  Obviously the web is capable of incarating the Word via the Image.. the Image via the Word.. and thus the entirety of Revelation via relation.  This, no doubt is is its strongest area, albeit massively underdeveloped.  But as well, it partakes somewhat of architecture's ability to form us, gather us, make a community,  and even somewhat of a family out of us. traditional, proven, and beloved devotional forms belong in this ubiquetous medium that humans move through and inhabit.  In journal, forum and field tests for a modern Christendom and "field tests" for resultant devotions