Photos by Ezra Clark
Article by Madeline Teeter
NEWBERG, Ore. – At the beginning of this semester, Brendan’s Cross was installed in the Alumni Garden, located next to George Fox University’s (GFU) chapel. Having been in the works for nearly four years, the cross has reached its home on campus, but not without loss.
Brendan’s Cross is named after the Irish stonemason, Brendan McGloin, whom GFU commissioned to create it. On April 4, 2025, McGloin passed away from cancer. McGloin had made considerable progress on the cross, but was unable to complete it before his passing.
Robin Baker, president of GFU, visited the McGloin family to give his condolences and plan a way forward. “Brendan’s family feels strongly that the cross should be finished to honor Brendan’s legacy,” Baker said in a blog post last year.
Baker wrote of how the cross would be completed: “His brother, Francis McGloin, found two of the finest sculptors in Ireland – Jackie McKenna and Seamus Dunbar. … They love this project, and although Brendan did not leave directions on exactly how to do a number of things, they have accepted the challenge.”
Francis McGloin maintained a managerial role on Brendan’s Cross, also bringing in his sister Geraldine McGloin’s artistry to finish the work, making it a family and expert affair. Baker writes, “It has truly become a work of a team with great love for the project and its original creator.”
The artists were diligent in holding to Brendan McGloin’s vision for the cross. The cross was created in the Celtic high cross tradition, which has persisted for over a thousand years and has deep ties to Ireland.
Brian Doak, academic vice president of digital programs & innovations and professor of Biblical studies, explained in a George Fox Digital post that the university chose this style of cross for many reasons: “First of all, there’s just the sheer artistic achievement of the cross which I think gestures really well to our identity as a community of makers.”
The Celtic cross requires intense artistic discipline to create. “To make that cross, the hammer has risen and fell millions of times,” said Séamus Dunbar, Brendan McGloin’s mentor and fellow stonemason. “That energy goes into the stone. It's not the same as just routing it out with a machine. Every blow is a thought process and that's recorded in the stone; it feeds back out to people who view it over the years and the decades to come.”
Celtic high crosses are also tied to places of education in Medieval Ireland. Doak said. “The crosses were almost always on the sites of monasteries. … The cross gestures towards the university as a site of learning, just as these monasteries were sites of learning, integrated with worship.”
“The carving of this [cross] was an act of worship in itself,” Dunbar said. Brendan’s Cross features scenes from both the Old and New Testaments, with one side displaying the Crucifixion and the other the Resurrection. The artists who continued Brendan McGloin’s work said that it made them think in a new way about the depth of the biblical scenes they were carving.
A third reason for choosing the Celtic cross tradition was its permanence. “That is the beauty of stone: You feel a connection to the past and you feel that it's going to live on for quite some time,” said Jackie McKenna, an artist who helped complete the cross.
“[Brendan’s] Cross will stand on our campus in Oregon, and if it lasts the way its ancestors have lasted, then a thousand years from now, long after our names are forgotten, it will still be standing, still telling the story, still drawing people to the deeply human drama of the gospel, still drawing people to Christ,” Doak said.
Brendan McGloin echoes the novelty of leaving behind something of permanence in this world: “We’ve all got a short period on this planet. And for people to be afforded the opportunity to leave something substantial behind them is special,” he said.
“One thing [the cross] teaches us is that our way in faith goes through the cross, through endurance, through every paradox that the cross signifies: triumph and pain, high and low, action and waiting, building and destruction, death and resurrection,” Doak said. “This is the kind of symbol a Christian university should have.”
For years to come, Brendan’s Cross will stand at GFU as a reminder of McGloin’s legacy and as a symbol of the faith and hardships which it represents.
