At its zenith, church archi­tec­ture inspired awe, wonder, and fear.  Europe’s great cathe­drals of cen­turies ago sent shiv­ers down parishioners’ spines.  They made church­go­ers feel small, humble, and blessed to coex­ist with such mas­sive structures.  And cathe­drals not-so-subtly implied that these feats would be impos­si­ble with­out divine sanction.

Although many con­tem­po­rary reli­gious build­ings pro­vide beau­ti­ful exam­ples of modern archi­tec­ture, few trig­ger quite the same emo­tive shock that the cathe­drals once did.  Nonethe­less, recent devel­op­ments in archi­tec­ture–most notably the cre­ative use of glass–may present an oppor­tu­nity for a new twist on an old idea.

With this in mind–and with the caveat that I am not an archi­tect–I offer up the fol­low­ing con­cept: A church built on the edge of a steep moun­tain slope with a can­tilevered over­hang and glass floors, walls, and ceil­ings through which con­gre­gants could stare up at the clouds or gaze down into the depths to con­tem­plate awe and fear, Heaven and Hell, and belief and disbelief.  With a tingle in their toes, they would have to trust in God (and/or the archi­tects) to ensure that the translu­cent glass floor would pre­vent them from falling to their deaths: Faith made visceral.

To better illus­trate the idea, here are some rel­e­vant prece­dents:

Meanwhile, I have a short arti­cle on Allen Gross­man over at Sight­ings, the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Divin­ity School’s online jour­nal ded­i­cated to exam­in­ing “the role of reli­gion in public life,” edited by the thrice-​great Kris­ten Tobey. There’s no com­ment sec­tion, so I thought I’d open up this post to responses, should any be forthcoming—although I should note that I am no longer sure I agree with any­thing I wrote.

The latest chap­ter in orga­nized religion’s millennia-​old quest to con­vert the hea­thens is play­ing out in Angola. A Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle last week dis­cussed the Pope’s recent efforts to per­suade African Catholics to relin­quish the tal­is­mans, witches, curses and shamans of their ves­ti­gial ani­mist traditions.  The sit­u­a­tion raises del­i­cate ques­tions about where to draw the line between the occult of yes­ter­year and gen­uine arti­cles of modern faith. 

From the NYT arti­cle announc­ing the results of the Pew Forum’s U.S. Reli­gious Land­scape Survey:

The new report sheds light on the beliefs of the unaf­fil­i­ated. Like the over­whelm­ing major­ity of Amer­i­cans, 70 per­cent of the unaf­fil­i­ated said they believed in God, includ­ing one of every five people who iden­ti­fied them­selves as atheist…