BUSTH MDiv Student Welling Hall Published in Friends Journal
The following is an excerpt from the Friends Journal article “Transforming Weapons into Art: The Theopoetics of Beating Swords into Plowshares” by BUSTH master of divinity student Welling Hall, published on September 1, 2022. Click here to read the full article.
I became an artist when I began to perform acts of aesthetic fury to decry gun violence. My experiments began while I was Plowshares professor of Peace Studies at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana. I wrote a grant to work with a metalsmith to teach me how to beat a sword into a plowshare because, given my title, I thought it would be a good thing to know. The metalsmith I worked with, Sungyeoul Lee, quickly persuaded me that lost-wax casting would be a far-more accessible technique than forging.