History Chronicled With Religious Architecture

OLI Snippets

(from my short posts on social media)

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St. Stephen's Catholic Cathedral; Passau, Bavaria, Germany
Photo credit: my friend Mary Bryant McCourt, May 2023

For all my preacher friends:  How's this for a church pulpit? 

Preachers speaking from such an opulent elevated platform needn't worry about their sermon getting boring - because if it does, congregants can just let their minds wander over all that gold leaf!  

I only hope the theology preached from it is more valuable than its gilded ornamentation.  I mean, seriously!  I'd never have guessed this audaciously decorated tableau was a historic German church.  I'd have guessed France, or maybe even Russia, but not the country that has given us the austere, clean-lined BMW and Mercedes-Benz brands.

As an architecture student in college, we studied many religious structures because throughout history, they often represented the pinnacle of their respective society's ideologies and abilities.  The sociological cynic would categorize religion as a form of folkloric storytelling, or cultural assimilation, or moral dogma, or a primitive way of explaining how people groups interpreted their natural environment.  But some cultures - generally the ones with more sophisticated religions - eventually came to dominate entire regions of the world, and have played significant roles in developing construction methodologies and aesthetic principles that we still incorporate today in our built environment.

Up until the Industrial Revolution, whether in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Central and South America, or Europe, religious structures such as this one were lavished with a panoply of human resources to inform their own culture - and their enemies - who and what their society represented (whether everyone believed the same thing or not).  Religious structures were literally the brick-and-mortar of their community.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution - which brought unprecedented wealth to our planet - the amount of resources we spend on our religious buildings has paled by comparison.  Hardly any society today expends the type of effort - in money and labor - that used to be spent on religious structures.  Many reasons exist for this, such as: 

- a continued splintering of various sects from the larger body of beliefs (particularly within Islam and Christianity), meaning religious groups are smaller and less willing to share resources;

- few monarchies and political dynasties powerful enough to force subjects into religious submission

- changing aesthetic tastes (such as severe Modern and Post-Modern minimalism within Judaism);

- advanced construction technologies that can actually lower overall costs by making formerly prohibitive designs relatively accessible (and therefore, less remarkable);

- a lack of interest by most religious leaders and their adherents today to create monolithic memorials to their faith and deity, and/or a preference to spend money in different ways;

- and yes, the drastically-lower reliance people across the globe have on religion and deities.  These days, we have easy access to so many devices, ideas, and other influences to help us feel more self-actualized.  Religion, which almost universally involves a certain level of adherence to a thought structure we have not created ourselves, seems so antiquated and bothersome to many people.

Whether they're religious or not, very few societies now use buildings as their main source of pride and identity anyway (with the possible exception of Persian Gulf states and China, homes to some of the most audacious new buildings on our planet).  I've written before about my Mom's childhood church in Maine, once the beacon of her coastal village, now rotting away atop a hill with millions of dollars worth of stained glass windows disintegrating in place, no services or any public use for over 15 years now.  

We all are aware of how much society is changing, and one of the values in architecture is that it helps tell us where we've been, and maybe even what we're missing today despite all our "progress".

PS - when I checked out my blog on my smartphone, and saw Mary's photo, the pulpit, resized for a smaller screen, looked more like a snake's head, or maybe one of those ceremonial Chinese dragons.  That jagged-edged canopy and wrap-around stairway - Yikes!  Now I can't help but see it as fearsome - awe of a negative sort.  It reminds me of the dramatic pulpit and canopy of a much newer church, a rare example of extravagant contemporary evangelical Christian architecture:  Coral Ridge Presbyterian in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  I've never been in person, but from the videos and photos I've seen, their black snake-like canopy over the pulpit seems straight out of the Garden of Eden - in a bad way.

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