by Elæ Moss
Greetings fellow humans! I’m Elæ Moss, and I’m excited to welcome you to come along with me as I journey through the landscape where contemporary faith, the arts, and social justice work meet—a process I’ll be recording and reflecting on here with you in monthly Field Notes form. This series is imagined as a kind of roving R+D lab, where we’ll explore how what I’m calling “faith infrastructures” can be reimagined as systems of care for our collective future, understanding these “structures” as operating at a range of scales: from the individual human spiritual and somatic to the relational and collective and up to physical brick and mortar spaces and the institutional or systemic beyond that!
But I also want to acknowledge something important: as artists, scholars, and researchers, we’re often taught to approach our work as if it needs to be perfect, clear, and complete—wrapped up neatly in finite answers. That’s not what I’m aiming for here. What we actually need to allow for is mess. There’s a liberation in embracing the messiness of meaning-making, in recognizing that the frameworks and language we use are not fixed or hierarchical. They are playful, fungible, and entirely of our own invention.
A Life in R+D
Something to know about me is that I’ve always approached life itself as a form of research and development – aka, “R+D.” Every day offers us moments to explore, to create, and to refine how we engage with each other, with our bodies, with the systems we inhabit, and with the world beyond what we can see. For me, this is more than just an abstract principle; it’s a faith practice. I sometimes joke that “life is divinity school,” but in that humor lies a profound belief—that we are all participants in a larger field of inquiry and creation, whether or not we recognize it.
This playfulness is crucial because it brings people into the equation rather than removing them from it. My goal in using language and frameworks that might seem formal or theoretical is actually to show their plasticity—to invite you to see them as tools we can bend, shape, and reinvent. They don’t belong to anyone. They’re not scarce. They are alive, just like the faith technologies I’ll be discussing throughout this series.
About This Series
“Speculative Solidarities” is a term I’ve used for years to describe the tools, infrastructures, and practices we can collectively imagine and build to foster more liberatory futures. We operate speculatively—by creating spaces of possibility and belief—and we center solidarity with an awareness of our interdependence as humans.
In this series, you’ll hear me use some terminology I’ve been using in my creative practice and teaching for many years – many of which intentionally play on “technical” language as a way to poke at the ways we make meaning in our world. So I want to let you in on that secret right from the jump – that for me, using a term like “field notes” is an invitation to all of us to engage in a sort of citizen science that’s part of that human R+D we were talking about. This work is about reclaiming our shared capacity to invent, reframe, and organize ideas that help us live more meaningfully—whether individually or collectively!
Faith, in this context, is not just about institutional religion. It’s a human technoscience—a way of understanding how we relate to the forces that shape our lives, whether we call them God, spirit, or the laws of physics. Faith infrastructures, the physical, social, and spiritual systems that support belief and community, have long been compromised by the demands of power and economy. And yet, they remain profoundly alive with potential.
The Power of Mess and Play
I’m thinking as I write this about Adrian Piper considering what “to art” means, as a verb, and bell hooks in the ways she Teaches to Transgress, in particular via her framing of theory as a liberatory practice. Which is to say that what I’m interested in here is not a neat, polished product, but an ongoing process of questioning. Why do we take on certain forms of language or framework? Why do we perform knowledge in ways that often seem to exclude rather than include? For me, the act of using these formal structures is a way of troubling them, of showing how they can be played with, deconstructed, and re-imagined.
This process is a practice of re/membering—of returning to the ways we, as humans, naturally engage in meaning-making. It’s an invitation to approach faith technologies not as rigid dogmas, but as dynamic, living systems that evolve as we evolve. These are practices that bridge the body and the liturgy, and in clearing space for play and experimentation, we make room for more authentic engagement with the divine, with each other, and with the world.When we’re thinking about what sanctuary looks like, in this context – and as something we build, and perhaps seek to learn to embody, as imperfect humans, I want to invite us to think about speculative solidarities as offering ways of being with and for each other that offer us a necessary messy, playful, iterative form of sanctuary. Ecologically, what we might understand as “mess” is in fact essential to our evolution, and as we seek to build and offer sanctuary through care and solidarity with all beings it can be healing for us to relieve whatever pressure we may have felt that to be in sacred communion with each other is to seek perfection, to leave our humanness – and our human mess – behind. How can we find grace, humor, and critical data in the challenges we face in seeking to change ourselves and our world? Remembering, perhaps, that the mess holds as much (or more) of our sacred selves as any of our “successful” parts?
Why This Matters Now
In an era when so many institutional systems are failing us, from political structures to economic frameworks, faith infrastructures offer a powerful site for reimagining what care and community might look like. These spaces—whether they are churches, synagogues, mosques, or secular sanctuaries—can serve as models for how we might build resilient, interdependent systems that offer sanctuary in times of collapse. They can teach us about care, hospitality, and long-term thinking.
The work of retrofitting these infrastructures isn’t just about physical buildings. It’s about rethinking what we value as a society, and how we prioritize the well-being of people and the planet. Movement spaces, third spaces, arts communities, and tech have much to teach faith communities about accessibility, replicability, and scalability. And faith institutions, in turn, have lessons about resilience, care, and collective well-being that are often missing from secular justice movements.And: when we think about creating and maintaining sanctuary in a way where we’re understanding humans as the primary material, what does a process of looking at our individual and collective bodies as vessels of hope, and faith look like? How can we recognize ourselves as “faith infrastructures,” and the work of building collective sanctuary as that of building and exercising a kind of muscle, one capable of embodied belief in all we are capable of? This is ultimately speculative work: it doesn’t seek answers or hard facts as much as it offers hypothesis, as we iterate future formations of the possible together…and have grace for the mess this necessarily requires as we put one foot in front of the other, sometimes stumbling.
What’s Next?
Over the course of this series, I’ll be asking questions about how we can build these speculative solidarities in practice. What might our faith communities look like if we embraced more radical forms of pastoral care, solidarity economies, and mutual aid? How can we create spaces for sanctuary, not just in the traditional sense, but in ways that meet the material and spiritual needs of our communities?
I’m not claiming to have all the answers by any means, and I am certainly not the first and not the only one asking these questions! Throughout this series I’ll be pointing you towards past and present thinkers, leaders, and organizations who inspire me every day. That said I do hope that by sharing my own journey through evolving my ministry – as well as my teaching, creative practice, and justice organizing—we can begin to develop strategies that help us navigate the complex realities of our time.
As a teaser, a snapshot of what Faith in Practice looks like for me as I take these Field Notes is this: I’m currently serving as a Community Minister at Judson Memorial Church in New York, working towards ordination through the Interspiritual Seminary program at One Spirit, working as an Interfaith Advisor through Pratt’s nascent Commons initiative, and I’m also participating in the Solidarity Circles initiative through Vanderbilt Divinity School’s Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice. Which is to say: I am deeply and incredibly blessed to be practicing, preaching, teaching, and learning alongside some of the most inspiring and visionary people out there, who are deeply committed to their own forms of these questions.
As we move through these months we’ll explore individual practices like prayer and collective forms of care, and I’ll also share invitations, links and other media from the work on the ground I’m engaged in, from roundtables to coalition-building and more.Each month, we’ll take on a different theme or lens through which to consider these questions, and I invite you to join me in this experiment as we explore what it means to create sanctuary for ourselves and each other in the face of uncertainty and change. This R+D is concrete, as my work has long been focused on locating, sharing (and developing when necessary) tools, blueprints, and other resources for changemaking. From sacred considerations of how we engage with fiscal resources to how we prepare ourselves (spiritually, materially, and skill-wise) for climate and other disasters to ways to build and support change-oriented arts programming that facilitates local coalition building, we’ll investigate the possible and celebrate the stewards already nurturing the seeds of sanctuary.
Consider this an open door, a welcome to this table, a shoulder, ear, a channel – for you to come along with me as I humbly walk into this next phase of my own life, with faith that liberatory potential is down this road. So… maybe I’ll see you around? I truly truly hope so.
All work at The Commons is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Elæ Moss is a multimodal artist-researcher, culture worker, and system doula dedicated to radical modes of relational and spiritual engagement. Elæ currently serves as a Community Minister at Judson Memorial Church, focused on sustainable human infrastructure building at the intersection of community education, collective care, faith, arts, and social justice. They teach and work as an Interfaith Advisor at Pratt Institute, are a Civic Leadership Fellow at the Interfaith Center of New York, and are also a member of the 2024-25 Solidarity Circles cohort at Vanderbilt Divinity School.
Elæ is currently preparing for Interspiritual ordination through the Seminary program at OneSpirit, following two years as an MFA Public Action Fellow at Bennington, both the culmination of over twenty years approaching ministry as equally art and sacred service: creating sanctuary tools and spaces for seekers, rooted in commons-driven social justice organizing. A practitioner of Buddhist and Q’ero medicine traditions, Elæ is also a certified Quantum Touch healer, mindfulness facilitator, and officiant of radically reimagined human rituals. In addition to their Public Action MFA, Elæ holds a Masters in Urban Design from CCNY, and did Doctoral Research in Cultural Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Find them at: https://onlywhatican.net, on substack, or on instagram at @thetroublewithbartleby.
