Keystone Symbolics

"Taste and see.”

Keystone Symbolics is a salvage operation. We’re trying to recover things lost to the idols of utility and causality. Sadly, our modern obsession with practicality and effectiveness has impoverished the Christian church, almost as much as it has our culture more broadly. Though we are materially better off than kings and queens of the past, we have lost much of our ability to experience meaning, identity, purpose, deep beauty, wonder….

Our mission within the mission

As the outward-facing division of Boston Fellows, Keystone Symbolics exists to train leaders to step into their role in the cosmic story by means of Biblical symbolism. 

Director

Kelly Alvin Madden, PhD, MDiv leads Keystone Symbolics. His personal experience in the recent rediscovery of this lost language added another dimension to how he reads the Bible and walks with Jesus. 

Resources

Currently we offer the following ways to grow in this form of spiritual formation:

  • “Seeing the Keystone” is Kelly’s weekly publication. Browse and subscribe (free).

  • See especially the series “Regency: The Meaning of Our Work: A Practical Symbology.”

  • Workshops and training: Biblical symbolism is deeply practical. So the best way to “get” it is doing specific exercises while praying prayers from the Bible connected to God’s self-revelation in this way.

  • Speaking engagements: Kelly addresses many topics in biblical symbolism, from the history of how we lost this language to the ancient principles of spiritual formation in its use, to simple practices.

  • Outdoor education: Our training is especially appropriate to activities in God’s natural world.

Few readers of the Bible can fail to see its symbolism altogether. Parables, prophetic imagery, word play, metaphors—they strike us on almost every page. The Bible is a story, after all, and as in all good stories, themes and patterns emerge naturally. 

What we modern readers miss, however, is just how frequent and how basic these are. Jonathan Edwards, widely viewed as America’s greatest theologian, insisted that every single entity in creation reflects and connects to God. It is a “typological” (symbolic) language that we can learn, through spiritual openness and attention.

God has revealed himself in this way through creation, so all people have some experience of it. If they “have eyes to see” it.


Contact Keystone

Write to us, to customize and schedule training modules, at: keystone@bostonfellows.com .