Real Clear Religion picks the ugliest church in the world

August 19, 2013
John B. Chilton

Nicholas G. Hahn, deputy editor of Real Clear Religion offers his picks for the ugliest churches in the world in this slideshow. There are some doozies. Do you have other nominations?

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billydinpvd

August 21, 2013 10:23 am

Hmm . I see the author is a right wing RC who used to work for Donald Rumsfeld and seems to think the American bishops are just too darned liberal. I suspect that this “ugly church” thing is more about reactionary ideology as it is aesthetics – or, rather, a conflation of ideology and aesthetics in which all Right Thinking Christians love only traditional architecture and anyone who likes certain schools of 20th century religious architecture is a Modernist Heretic.

Bill Dilworth

billydinpvd

August 21, 2013 9:55 am

Almost as bitchy as the Bad Vestments blog.

I agree that some of those houses of worship were quite ugly. One seemed rather ordinary (Church by the Sea). Others, I thought, were beautiful. I imagine that most of them, ugly or not, are loved by those who attend them.

Bill Dilworth

tgflux

August 20, 2013 5:25 pm

You get the feeling that the author never saw a Pseudo-Gothic he didn’t adore (and there *are* Neo-Gothic FAILs out there!).

JC Fisher

Rob Michaels

August 20, 2013 4:14 pm

Some are clunkers, but others imaginative uses of native materials & cultural preferences

John

August 20, 2013 2:46 pm

I agree with JC Fisher above. It’s not the churches in this slideshow that are ugly, but the attitude toward them. OK, there are a couple of clunkers, architecturally speaking, but many of them seem to have been chosen simply because they serve as rich targets for the author’s snark.

John Banks

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