Geometry of Love Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church

Margaret Visser has visited many more churches than most people, but like the rest of us she began to tire of the slew of facts & lack of meaningful information available from guidebooks. The desire to find answers to her own questions--as a traveler, a believer, & a first-rate scholar, with an insatiable curiosity & a gift for revealing the meanings of seemingly ordinary objects--led her to undertake this unique & revelatory book. Visser chose a small & relatively simple church in Rome, Sant' Agnese fuori le Mura, as her subject: a church that could stand for all churches. She casts a wide net, however--taking in history, theology, anthropology, & folklore, among other disciplines--to illuminate its physical & spiritual architecture. As she guides us through the building, from entrance to apse, catacombs to campanile, Visser explores the symbolism of lambs, the Christian fascination with virgins, the meanings of martyrdom, & the history of relics. At the same time, she moves back through the centuries to reveal Christianity in its earliest forms & purposes. The book ends at the church's beginning, with the grave of Agnes, a twelve-year-old girl who was murdered seventeen hundred years ago. By then we have learned how to read any church building, how to interpret what it "does" & "says," whether we are of any faith, or none.Visser, Margaret is the author of 'Geometry of Love Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church' with ISBN 9780865476189 and ISBN 0865476187.