Restoration and Renovation

Decades Ago, Students Attacked the ‘Iron Horse.’ Now It Rides Again.

David Bale3 weeks ago018 mins

The most famous beastly sculpture in the college town of Athens, Ga., is — improbably — not a bulldog. It is an 11-foot-tall welded steel horse, an abstract labyrinth of undulations and crescents, created at the University of Georgia by a visiting Chicago sculptor, Abbott Pattison, in 1954. When a crane first heaved Pattison’s mammoth…

In Damascus, Syrians Reclaim Spaces and Freedoms After al-Assad’s Fall

David Bale1 month ago013 mins

For much of her life, Sumaya Ainaya spent weekend and summer nights on Mount Qasioun, which overlooks the city of Damascus, joined by other Syrians drinking coffee, smoking hookah and eating corn on the cob roasted on grills nearby. But soon after the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, the military under President Bashar al-Assad…

How One Pastor Is Helping Struggling Churches Keep Their Doors Open

David Bale1 month ago018 mins

Late last month, two days before Christmas, the Rev. Dr. Katrina D. Foster, pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, was showing off her church’s recent renovations. The neo-Gothic church was built in 1891, and the original blue, vaulted ceiling; wooden pews; stained-glass windows; and a Jardine & Son pipe…