Artists are themselves leaders: they may never inspire with a speech, preach from a pulpit, or own a company, but they are leaders by the sheer fact of their awareness and observation and because of the stories they tell and the language and symbols they create.

In their lifetimes Emily and Vincent were forced to operate in predetermined categories, strictly limited domains of how they were to serve God. Such categories, while often created with the best of intentions, are reductionist. They limit how we view humanity, not to mention God, and do not take into account the deep wrestling with faith, or its l

Mearcstapa is not a comfortable role. Life on the borders of a group—and in the space between groups—is prone to dangers literal and figurative, with people both at home and among the “other” likely to misunderstand or mistrust the motivations, piety, and loyalty of the border-stalker. But mearcstapa can be a role of cultural leadership in a new mo

Artists are instinctively uncomfortable in homogeneous groups, and in “border-stalking” we have a role that both addresses the reality of fragmentation and offers a fitting means to help people from all our many and divided cultural tribes learn to appreciate the margins, lower barriers to understanding and communication, and start to defuse the cu

an Old English word used in Beowulf : mearcstapas, translated “border-walkers” or “border-stalkers.”1 In the tribal realities of earlier times, these were individuals who lived on the edges of their groups, going in and out of them, sometimes bringing back news to the tribe.

Mearcstapas are called into the margins, into stalking the borders, moving between traditional tribes and the unknown.