Houses of God

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 will be welcomed by students of American social history, religion, and American studies, as well as by travelers and those who find religious architecture fascinating.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.