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The Iconography of the American City: or, A Gothic Tale of Modern Times

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Peter W. Williams
Peter W. Williams
Affiliation:
Distinguished Professor of Religion and American Studies at Miami University. On January 9, 999, he delivered this paper as the presidential address to the American Society of Church History.
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Extract

Some dozen years ago, I began in collaboration with David Holmes, Dewey Wallace, Charles Wallace, and others to conduct tours of houses of worship during the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the American Society of Church History. The challenge of these tours for me gradually metamorphosed from providing basic information on dates, architectural styles, and parish history highlights—all useful enough in themselves—to reading these buildings in the broader context of the urban built environment. Churches, synagogues, and other religious buildings do not appear in the vacuum that a slide presentation or text illustration might suggest. Rather, they are in a continual mute dialogue with their surroundings, which in the urban context tend to be other buildings of commercial or civic purpose. The context is also four-dimensional. Not only do religious buildings themselves undergo expansion, remodeling, and changes in denominational identity, but their neighbors frequently change even more rapidly.

Type
Articles
Information
Church History , Volume 68 , Issue 2 , June 1999 , pp. 373 - 397
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1999

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