Stained Glass Scholar

Have you ever run across something so interesting, you wanted to write a school paper about it, and then you couldn’t find any sources for that thing, and after a two-month extension and a half dozen emails with your professor about it, took it very personally, got carried away and decided you were going to write the source you needed yourself?

Because I have, and now I’m gathering research to publish a book containing as many histories of American cathedrals as I can find and verify (and I got a B on that paper in the end, by the way).

As part of a religious history class, I wanted to write a paper inspired by a visit to a local cathedral – St. Phillip’s (Episcopal) in Atlanta. It never even crossed my mind that it would be a difficult topic to write about – after all, they’re great big honking buildings, in the middle of most major metropolitan areas, seen by thousands of people every day, surely someone has written something about them. And then, almost immediately, I started running into literary walls. I couldn’t find a single book about the history of the American cathedrals specifically. My professor gave me some of the usual advice – get a reference librarian to help you, try one of the other universities in our system – but we continued to turn up nothing. I don’t even remember what my paper’s original thesis was anymore, because I had to give up on two or three attempts for lack of resources.

Eventually, I turned in some semblance of an overview of American cathedral-building, cobbled together from better-documented bits and pieces – histories of anti- Catholic legislation, Industrial Revolution-era mining and shipping, Gothic Revival architecture, and Greek immigration all painted a rough outline, and by then, it became clear that this had spiraled way out of the usual scope of a paper for a 300-level class.

But I’m stubborn, and curious, and that’s a combination that always ends well, right?

I’m a person who grew up surrounded by books. I have always been comforted and excited by the fact that anything I ever wanted to learn someday, I could find a book about it. I might not be able to read them all in my lifetime (and man, did that cause some crying existential crises when I was a kid) but knowing the books were out there, somewhere, quietly waiting for me whenever I needed them, has always been a comforting thought. Running into my first-ever situation where there isn’t a book when I need it is something I’ve taken a little personally.

So, this project is my attempt to fill that gap. The historical knowledge is out there, in the form of tourism guides and historical booklets lovingly curated and maintained by church members and staff. Unfortunately, they’re usually self-published and/or distributed very locally, making them a resource that’s not widely accessible. Sometimes, they’ve never even been written down – some of these histories only exist in one person’s living memory.

My goal is to contact and/or visit as many of the American cathedrals as possible, document everything I can find, research what I can’t, conduct interviews, and compile it all into something more broadly accessible and easily referenced. I approach this project with an intention to share and amplify knowledge, not to claim credit for it. My hope is just to help find, share, and preserve historical knowledge. My fascination, and therefore my project’s focus, is more on the historic than on the religious aspects – it’s not my place or my intention to weigh in on anyone’s faith or practice in any of my writing. These beautiful, fascinating buildings, and the communities they are a part of, deserve to have their stories told, and all history deserves to be preserved and recorded. If my writing can help serve that purpose, then I’ll be content with my work.