The work of architectural practice has been connected to the spirituality of forgiveness in several ways. I seek to offer a review of these connections, organizing existing research conceptually around three touch points: 1. Site: The design of architectural sites intended for interpersonal forgiving (for example, Taylor & Hinds’ Krakani-lumi); 2. Expression: The design of architectural structures and monuments intended to express forgiveness in their embodied materiality (for example, Vancouver’s City of Reconciliation initiative); 3. Critique: Circumstances of architectural failure or violence that call for or ask what it would mean to ‘forgive’ an architectural perpetrator (for example, the accusations of Gianni Pettena). A fourth, underexplored touch point might exist between forgiveness and architecture, namely, that the very practice and process of architecture contains a strong resemblance to something like forgiveness. The legitimacy of speaking of ‘something like’ forgiveness requires establishing. To explore this legitimacy, I plan to engage with the work of Adam Morton and Haddon Willmer, both of whom expose the positive value of not beginning with a single definition of forgiveness but looking to the full breadth of ‘forgiveness territory’—the unnamed, undefined forgivings which hold life together in contexts far from interpersonal conflict.
Dr Jessica Scott
08 October 2025
Jessica Scott appointed as McDonald Agape Research Associate in Theology & the Visual Arts
Dr Jessica Scott joins the Centre for Arts & the Sacred at King’s.
Dr Jessica Scott has been appointed at the Visual Arts in the Centre for Arts & the Sacred at King’s (ASK) in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. After completing her monograph on ways in which the work of architects and urbanists can illuminate (and sometimes embody) the idea of epektasis (movement towards/within God’s infinity), Dr Scott will begin work her new project examining Forgiveness and Architecture.
Dr Scott comes from the University of Nottingham where she taught Christian Theology at the University of Nottingham.
Among numerous invited lectures and presentations, she has spoken on Theology and the Visual Arts at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, New York City (‘Place, Imagination, and Hope: A Theological Reflection on the Paintings of Stanley Spencer’, November 2023), at the Nottingham Being Human Festival (‘Picasso, Art, and Faith’ with artist Lorna Hamilton, November 2023), and at the Society for the Study of Theology (‘Building Forgiveness: On the presence of forgiving in architectural practice’, April 2023).
She is Convenor of Ukrainian Iconography Workshop at the University of Nottingham, working with Ukraine Catholic University and iconographer Sofiia Strakhova, as part of the ‘Theology in a Time of War’ project, for which she is Co-Investigator.
Her publications include ‘“Come and See”: Uncovering Julian of Norwich’s Teaching of Wonder in Revelations of Divine Love’, in Modern Theology 38: 485-499, and she was co-editor of Noesis: Journal of Theology, Philosophy, and Poetics in 2019. She serves on the Grove Doctrine Editorial Board.
The McDonald Agape Foundation has granted this appointment and continues to support the larger Theology and the Visual Arts project where Dr Scott’s research will sit.