Why do I do geeky stuff and Catholic stuff? Well, Fan Art and Religious Art are essentially the same thing -- let me explain.

Orson Scott Card once wrote about how Science Fiction is the genre most suited to exploring religious and metaphysical themes, and that's a big part of why I love it so much. When your stories revolve around what humanity would be like in wildly different and alien circumstances, you get to the important questions pretty quickly. Likewise, religious faith concerns itself with the big questions: what does it mean to be human? What is our place in the universe? Will time ever end? What is the driving power of the cosmos?

I realized one day that so many of the medieval and renaissance paintings were basically mash-up fan art. You would have the central figure of Christ or Mary or a scene like the nativity, but often the artist would also portray certain saints that were important to the patron of the piece as being present in the scene as well. Sometimes he would even include a portrait of the patron or of the artist himself in it. In the development of Western Christianity, every version of every Bible story was different. All telling the same story, but emphasizing different aspects of it and often blending elements from the story seamlessly with parts of everyday life.

And I realized, that's what fan art is too. We take our favorite characters, favorite scenes, and portray them in new ways, with our own styles, sometimes combining characters from different universes or even from our real world. And it's glorious.

I love to incorporate geekiness into my everyday life, sneaking a Tardis onto my wallet here, some Elvish script onto my ID badge holder there, and hitting the high points of my favorite storyline with the charms on my necklace. Little ways of connecting me throughout the day to the stories and characters I love and admire.

Then I realized that religious jewelry is so much the same. Little ways people use to connect themselves throughout the day to the God we love and his saints that we admire.

So whether you fall more on the geeky side or the religious side or embrace them both, I hope you enjoy perusing my shop and find a few things to inject joy and hope into your life and your days. .

-Elisa