New Spiritual Mindsets

From Architecture from the Middle Ages, by Ulrike Laule, Rolf Toman, and Achim Bednorz (ISBN 389985053x; Berlin: Feierabend, 2004), p 8:

"The preserved and excavated legacies of an era make it possible to reconstruct the progeny and development of a style. The precondition for a style's existence is always a new esthetic ideal, a changing feel for space, which may result from changes in devoutness, a restructuring of liturgical rites, a change in the dominant cult, or from a new spiritual mindset."

I am enough of an adherent to the rule of prescription not to require that all churches build cathedrals. Yet this remark is instructive, not merely for why architectural styles have changed from cathedrals, but why all styles change or develop (or disappear). In part, it speaks to the fact that the culture of Christianity has changed. There may what some believe to be good reasons why we do not build cathedrals anymore. The point is that those reasons exist, and that they have become important enough to move us to build our places of worship differently. We also learn here that the decisions we make in how we build our replacements come from somewhere and are based in some different sensibility. We feel and think differently, therefore we, in many instanes, build (and sing and preach and pray) differently.

New Spiritual Mindsets

From Architecture from the Middle Ages, by Ulrike Laule, Rolf Toman, and Achim Bednorz (ISBN 389985053x; Berlin: Feierabend, 2004), p 8:

"The preserved and excavated legacies of an era make it possible to reconstruct the progeny and development of a style. The precondition for a style's existence is always a new esthetic ideal, a changing feel for space, which may result from changes in devoutness, a restructuring of liturgical rites, a change in the dominant cult, or from a new spiritual mindset."

I am enough of an adherent to the rule of prescription not to require that all churches build cathedrals. Yet this remark is instructive, not merely for why architectural styles have changed from cathedrals, but why all styles change or develop (or disappear). In part, it speaks to the fact that the culture of Christianity has changed. There may what some believe to be good reasons why we do not build cathedrals anymore. The point is that those reasons exist, and that they have become important enough to move us to build our places of worship differently. We also learn here that the decisions we make in how we build our replacements come from somewhere and are based in some different sensibility. We feel and think differently, therefore we, in many instanes, build (and sing and preach and pray) differently.