AFTER THE LAW
Photographs of churches in Europe in the summer of 2014.
Churches are great places. They are often cold which is pleasant on a hot day. They are often empty because no one believes in God anymore. They are always very big and quite often beautiful in one denominational way or another.
Lots of Western cultural history is about God, and Jesus. I like the stories of Jesus and some of the stories about God. I like visiting churches and seeing which parts they find interesting about these stories. Lots of the history of the church in Europe is about reading, reading – The Word which some of the Bible is about, sort of. Words have described The Word to me, but they didn’t always, sometimes people couldn’t read and needed pictures to help illustrate the stories that were in the book of God which they couldn’t read. The book was in the wrong language for most people to read, they needed art to translate it, which is where all that naughty potential of Western art happens a lot of times, people telling not quite the right story in the spoken translations from the altar and having paintings with special weirdo meanings built in painted along the walls where people would sit.
A lot of the books I read now could probably do with a translator, even though they are most often already translated into English. My job, a part of my job, the only one I enjoy or am any good at is translating some of these contemporary philosophy texts so that my students can understand them and write essays on them.
The act of translation from pictures into words, or words into pictures seemed to me to be something I might think about, in the cool of the churches, or the scalding heat outside of those with a fee to be paid to get inside, which could help keep my mind from wondering about why my father had insisted on taking a family holiday when he would be so unwell that he couldn’t leave the hotel, and to wonder about why we both thought God was an odd idea but only I thought that Christ was an interesting one.
Nothing makes sense, I thought, after the law.
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Sets of photographs from churches in Europe in 2014.
Click on the photo to see the next in the set. The last photo is only one.
A list of the churches is at the foot of the page.
St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh, 6th June 2014, 9.16pm.
Pfarrkirche Sankt Anna, Munich, 14th July 2014, time unknown.
St Johan Nepomuk Kirche, Munich, 14th July 2014, 10.34am.
Seekirche (Heileges Kreuz), Seefeld, 16th July 2014, 10.27am.
Dompfarre St Jakob, Innsbruck, 16th July 2014, 4.15pm.
Rosshute Kreuz, Rosshute, 17th July 2014, 10.24am.
Cathedrale Notre Dame de Paris, Paris, 23rd July 2014, 5.58pm.
La Basilique du Sacre Coeur de Montmartre, Paris, 23rd July 2014, 8.17pm
L'Eglise Saint Valery, Varengeville-sur-Mer, 27th July 2014, 4.55pm.
Notre Dames de Reims, Reims, 29th July 2014, 8.12am.
St Paul's Cathedral, London, 5th August 2014, 5.29pm.
Waverley Abbey, Farnham, 7th August 2014, 12.38pm.
Alva Parish Church, Alva, 25th December 2014, 2.04pm.