As the author of Americas Religious Architecture, I would like to thank Hollis Giammatteo for the thoughtful comments on the book. I would also like to suggest to the anonymous reviewer from Pittsburgh that she/he read a books preface and introduction before writing a review. Two errors to be noted: Bill Moyers did not write an introduction, and I am not the Director of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. I am the Director of the Center for the Documentation and Preservation of Places of Worship, and affiliate of the NCCJ, MN-Dakotas Region and adjunct faculty in the Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota. One last comment, as I noted in my preface, there are over 250,000 places of worship in the USA; I am quite sure I have around 249,500 of them angry at me for not including them in this book. I can only hope they will understand that the few represent the many.
It is hard to determine what Americas Religious Architecture is supposed to be. The survey of religious buildings is idiosyncratic, to say the least. People who know a community likely will be puzzled why certain buildings were included, and other, better, candidates excluded. Many of the photographs are so poorly composed, exposed, or reproduced that they are useless for revealing architectural detail. I bought the book based on a flyer from Preservation Press implying it was an architectural reference, and returned it to Amazon.com beacuse it is unusable as such. My apologies to Amazon.com for the inconvenience.
