Wooden Churches: A Celebration by Rick Bragg

Though usually plain, sometimes humble, wooden churches are something special. With no fancy accoutrements - the flying buttresses, the mountains of organ pipe, the marble floors, the windows of stained glass - wooden churches distinguish themselves through the people who built them, the people who preach in them, and the places they assume in the civic, moral, and spiritual life of the community.

There is something about a wooden church that moves artists and writers to very personal acts of creation. Perhaps it's the grain of the wood or the flaking paint. Maybe it's the strict angles of the eaves and the way footsteps echo across the floor. Wooden Churches glows with the work of such famed photographers as Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Gordon Parks, William Christenberry, and Tom Rankin and sings with the words of Eudora Welty, Raymond Carver, James Baldwin, Reynolds Price, Mark Twain, Carson McCullers, Lee Smith, Anne Tyler, John Irving, and Thomas Jefferson, among many others. 

Beginning with an introduction by Rick Bragg, the images and words follow shared lives from birth to death as they unfold between the hallowed walls of wooden churches large and small: the marriages, the picnics, the baptisms, the political meetings, the funerals, the pageants, and even the military strategy sessions of General U.S. Grant.