Category: emoji

“Today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). Jesus makes this promise to a condemned man crucified beside him. So the first person to receive such an assurance is a thief who had the good sense to ask at the very last moment. A Paradise emoji should keep something of that surprise: a…

The word rosary comes from the Latin rosarium, a rose garden. The French call it a chapelet, from an old word for a crown of flowers worn on the head. Either way, the rosary began as a gift of roses offered to Mary, one Hail Mary at a time. For an object we squeeze in…

“Hail Mary, full of grace”: millions of Catholics say these words every day, often without lingering on the last one. Yet grace is one of the most beautiful words in the Christian vocabulary, and one of the hardest to draw. There is no grace emoji, so we fall back on ✨, which also does duty…

Hamburg, 1839. A Lutheran pastor named Johann Hinrich Wichern runs a home for boys taken in from the streets. To tame their impatience before Christmas, he fixes candles to a large cartwheel: a small one for each weekday, a big one for each Sunday. Today’s Advent wreath descends from that rather practical invention. No Advent…

Faith, hope and love. In Sunday school we learned the three theological virtues almost like a nursery rhyme, always in that order, without quite knowing what “theological” meant. It simply means they come from God and lead back to him. Faith goes first, and that’s what a faith emoji ought to make visible. Artists have…

Two feet sticking out of a cloud, and nothing else. In many illuminated manuscripts and prints from the late Middle Ages, that is how the Ascension is shown: Christ has almost vanished, and down below the apostles stare upward, mouths open. As an Ascension emoji, it would be hard to beat. The account in the…

Twelve. The number is no accident: it echoes the twelve tribes of Israel, and Jesus himself sets it when he calls his first companions. Among them are four fishermen from the Sea of Galilee, a tax collector, two Simons, two Jameses, and a Judas who comes to a bad end. An apostles emoji would have…

A winged man, a lion, an ox and an eagle walk into a church. It sounds like the start of a joke, but it is how Christian art has portrayed the four evangelists for centuries. The four creatures come from the visions of Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation, and Saint Jerome matched them to…

A white dress or a borrowed suit, new shoes that pinch, a great-aunt who drove three hours, and a seven-year-old who cannot sit still in the third pew: First Communion looks much the same from one parish to the next. To share it in the family group chat you would need a First Communion emoji,…