This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Good evening.

As our lovely director of this wonderful institution, said previously, I am Father Patrick O'Rourke, the dean of students here at Hellenic College Holy Cross.

But about 12 years ago, almost 13 now, I was Scott Patrick O'Rourke, a wayward college graduate

who had just completed a postgraduate fellowship in Philadelphia, and who had just moved

for a summer to Charleston, South Carolina, to live and work with master craftsman and

artist and Andrew Gould.

Andrew, if you're unaware, Andrew designs Orthodox churches.

He designs everything that goes inside of a church from Iconestasis to vestments to windows.

But I didn't go there to work on architectural things alone.

One of the things that Andrew asked me to help with was my most recent

professional endeavor, which was journalism. He asked me to come and help establish the

Orthodox Arts Journal. And he told me that it would be a three-person team that would start

this, Andrew, myself, and some guy up in

Canada named Jonathan.

Jonathan Pajot is how I used to say it before I learned better.

And so 12, almost 13 years ago, I met Jonathan through the phone.

We've had many conversations, we've worked on a few different projects,

and I've even helped him with some of the things that he's done recently.

For those of you who are unaware of Jonathan's full trajectory, he was very much what you would call a starving artist as an icon carver.

And the Orthodox Arch Journal was his first foray into expressing his thoughts and his interpretations of symbolism within the confines of ecclesiastical art,

primarily in iconography.

And for about five years, Jonathan did that and was well received.

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