by Linda A. Dove
September 26, 2021
Good morning.
Our long absence from HUU has made me realize how attached I am to our schoolhouse in its lovely gardens and location. This gets me thinking about the physical aspect of church buildings, what religious meanings they convey, and how they do it.
My mother and I used to explore old churches in England. She loved the modest ones in country villages—every one unique in style. We also visited the early-Gothic cathedrals like Lincoln, the late-Gothic like Salisbury, and the classical Romanesque like Wren’s rebuilt St. Paul’s.
In America, from the 1500s, European settlers built churches that reflected the denominations of Britain, Ireland and Europe—mostly Catholic in Maryland, Episcopalian in Virginia, Puritan in New England, as well as Methodist, Congregationalist and Universalist. Soon immigrant Quakers entered Pennsylvania and spread out, as did Mennonites, Brethren, Baptists in the mid-west and south, Scots-Irish Catholics from the northeast, and Hispanic Catholics in the south and west. All these, and more, immigrant denominations, of course, had different takes on Christian theology, its practice, and church building styles.
Of course, this is a sweeping historical simplification, but I hope it’s a bit of context for my talk. And I choose to talk only about western Christian churches, not, say, temples and mosques, because it was this Christianity that gave birth to UU-ism.
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