Featured Window

Our Lady of Grace, Dearborn Heights, Michigan

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MSGC : Collections : Window

Window

Building Name: St. Albertus Church

City: Detroit

Window Shape: 4 (rounded or rose window)

Subject/Title of Window: Eye of God

Brief Description of Subject: This rose window is directly above the main altar. One of the photographs shows the window lit up with mostly reflected light. The other shows the window lit up with mostly refracted light, which is the way stained glass is designed to be seen. In the refracted version basically only the oculus in the center of this window would be visible.

The New Testament was written in Greek, it wasn't until after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire that the Bible was translated into Latin. This translation was done by St. Jerome in the early 5th Century and became the official version which is called the "Vulgate". Thus very early symbols in Christianity used the Greek language rather than the Latin.

The oculus in the center of this rose window contains a monogram for the core belief in Christianity -- "Jesus Christ is the Son of God and Savior". In Greek this is "Iesous CHristos THeou Yios Soter". If you take the letters that I have capitalized you get "ICHTHYS" which is the Greek word for fish -- thus the symbol of a fish for this belief. If you just take the first letters you would get the Greek letters "Iota , Chi, Theta, Upsilon, and Sigma". You can trace out each of these letters on the oculus -- this is the monogram of the core belief.

It is very fitting that above the altar is a symbol for the core belief of the Christian religion.

Height: ~8' diameter

The MSGC is a constantly evolving database. Not all the data that has been collected by volunteers has been sorted and entered. Not every building has been completely documented.

All images in the Index are either born-digital photographs of windows or buildings or are scans of slides, prints, or other published sources. These images have been provided by volunteers and the quality of the material varies widely.

If you have any questions, additions or corrections, or think you can provide better images and are willing to share them, please contact donald20@msu.edu