Soularium's History

A cultural researcher worked with some European staff in Spain to understand their ministry context. He used images to do his research because he found that "it is very hard for people to lie with an image". Meaning that because images cause us to respond both through our heart and mind they allow us to share more honestly rather than what we think someone wants to hear as an answer. Images are very personal and very different people can see very different things in the same image because of their different background experiences.
Soularium was created by artists on a summer project in NYC to help people engage people in dialogue, which also opens doors to talking about the spiritual and Jesus. Soularium as you now see it went through an initial prototype creation (and was used over 2 years) which was then field-tested across the United States and in several other countries before becoming what you now have based on the feed back that we received. (That process took about 3 -4 months.) After using Soularium hundreds of times we formatted the questions and tested the questions with over 100 images. We carefully chose the 50 images to give a wide-range for people to be able to use them to express their responses to the 5 questions. The images are deliberately often abel to be "read" a number of different ways and we avoided overt religious imagery generally. The questions are intended to help understand a person as a whole as well as their spiritual journey so that the conversation can be a dialogue and really getting to know the person as a person.