Houses of God

by Peter W. Williams

Houses of God is a fascinating look at how Americans shape their places of worship into multifaceted reflections of their culture, beliefs, and times. Peter Williams divides the nation into seven distinctive regions - New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, the South, the Old Northwest, the Great Plains and Mountains, the Spanish Borderlands, and the Pacific Rim - and traces the historical development of and geographic influences on religious building in each. Beautifully illustrated with over 100 photographs - some by extremely well known photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange - this handsome book is the first to provide a broad survey of American religious architecture. It is a deeply interdisciplinary study in which Williams examines the influences of immigration and internal population movements; landscape and stylistic changes in architecture; and "secular," liturgical, and theological influences. Accessible to the general reader as well as to the scholar, this volume