|
"Temples of Grace is a welcome, well-researched, and engagingly written deconstruction of early Protestant churches. Examining the material aspects of the buildings, Buggeln deftly peels back the layers of religious, social, economic, and political meaning she finds embedded in them. The result is at once a compelling analysis of evangelical architecture and religion in the first third of the nineteenth century and an eloquent treatise on the significance of the study of material culture... [An] important contribution to the exploration of church buildings as material culture... Well written and accessible, Buggeln's interdisiplinary examination offers valuable information and approaches to scholars and students of architecture, religion, and culture... A valuable contribution to the ongoing repositioning of religious buildings with cultural studies."—Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
A new kind of architectural history that combines the fields of U.S. history and religion to explain the transformation of worship and community throughout Connecticut in the early years of the new Republic.
Following the American Revolution, the majority of Connecticut’s religious societies tore down their boxy eighteenth-century meetinghouses and replaced them with something totally different: spired churches with an elaborate entrance portico on one of the shorter facades. These new buildings signaled a change in how these Christians conceptualized worship space, and in their fundamental understanding of the relationship between the spiritual and material aspects of their lives.
Because these new churches evoked a much-beloved myth of tightly-bound communities sharing democratic values and faith in God, they have often been romanticized as emblems of a bygone era of pastoral serenity. Yet, New England of the early nineteenth century—and its religious life in particular—was anything but tranquil. Revivalism, evangelicalism, and religious pluralism meshed with social, economic, and political dislocation to create a volatile period in which Christianity’s place was uncertain.
This study argues that religious belief and practice, altered in substance and even more so in style by evangelicalism, revival, and a pervasive culture of sensibility, called for new notions of worship. These new buildings helped individuals and congregations regain their equilibrium and developed their spiritual sensibilities and sense of community. They also soothed republican concerns about the need for a religious populace and were important signs of civility and refinement. As the most striking buildings in many Connecticut towns, these churches tell us what citizens of the early republic thought was important, and what they wanted visitors to find remarkable in a distinctive American landscape.
"This superb study will be read with profit by scholars working in the multi-disciplinary field of American studies. More specifically, the value of this work for students of religion lies in its many insights into the correlation between the function of religion (in belief and practice) and the form that it takes (in architecture).—The Journal of Religion
“Gretchen Buggeln has given us an exemplary work in the finest tradition of American Studies in which she eruditely and gracefully combines insights from the realms of architectural, cultural, religious and social history as well as material culture studies. Temples of Grace is a major
contribution to our understanding of how the study of the built environment of religion can illuminate an entire era in American history.”—Peter W. Williams, author of Houses of God: Region, Religion and Architecture in the United States, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and American Studies, Miami University
Winner of the Society for Historians of the Early Republic book prize.
|
|
GRETCHEN BUGGELN is Assistant Professor, Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, and Director of the Winterthur Research Fellowship Program. She has written numerous articles on the nineteenth-century religious landscape of Connecticut.
|
|
|
|
