Featured Window

Our Lady of Grace, Dearborn Heights, Michigan

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MSGC : Collections : Window

Window

Building Name: St. Mary Magdalen Catholic Church

Artist Name: Maria Orr

City: Kentwood

Window Shape: 2 (rectangle)

Subject/Title of Window: St. Augustine

Brief Description of Subject: One of nine exits from the Shrine of the Penitent. St. Augustine (354-430 A.D.), a philosopher and theologian who became a bishop, was born in Algeria to a pagan father and a Catholic mother. As a boy he received a Christian education, but later, as a pagan intellectual, resisted his mother’s pleas to become a Christian. After his conversion to Catholicism, he developed his own approach to philosophy and theology. He believed that the grace of Christ was indispensable to human freedom and framed the concepts of original sin and just war. When the Roman Empire in the West was starting to disintegrate, Augustine developed the concept of the church as a spiritual City of God distinct from the material Earthly City. He is regarded by most scholars as the most important figure in the ancient Western church, especially on the doctrine of grace. These windows were designed and painted by Michigan artist and longtime church member Maria Orr and were fabricated at the Pristine Glass Company in Grand Rapids, where she was employed. Pristine Glass employees Elizabeth Kolenda and her staff were much involved in the fabrication process by creating and cutting all the digital layouts for the window designs.

Inscriptions: St. Augustine

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