Description: Intermingling architectural, cultural, and religious history, Nelson reads Anglican architecture and decorative arts as documents of 18th-century religious practice and belief. Richly illustrated with more than 250 architectural images and photographs of religious objects, "The Beauty of Holiness" depends on exhaustive fieldwork to track changes in historical architecture. Nelson imaginatively reconstructs the history of the Church of England in colonial South Carolina and its role in public life, from its early years of ambivalent standing within the colony through the second wave of Anglicanism beginning in the early 1750s.
Review Quotes: ""The Beauty of Holiness" is an ambitiously conceived, richly imagined study that places South Carolina's colonial churches at the intersection of formal theology and popular culture. Louis Nelson shows us memorable buildings filled with communion silver, textiles, furnishings, and books, surrounded by tombs and gravestones and animated by formal liturgy, personal devotional practices, interdenominational debate, and social rivalry. This is the best history of American churches yet written."--Dell Upton, University of California, Los Angeles