What does a building mean to you? Is it just a thing, a purely physical being? Or is there substance beyond the bricks and mortar? Might there be something more there—something more than the sum of its parts?

Those are the kinds of questions that drive the Philadelphia Church Project.

The Project rather unexpectedly took flight in February 2007, during a spur-of-the-moment visit to Our Lady of Hope parish on North Broad Street...a church I had long known about but never before visited. My experience there rekindled my passion for grandiose, ornate religious architecture, and it made me realize that there were countless other such buildings out there, many of them in similar states of disrepair, neglect or anonymity.

My initial one-stop visit, then, turned into something much more: this titular project. Its goal, and by extension my goal, is to help shed some light on some of the unique, amazing or just plain weird churches in the Philadelphia area. Some of them may be in nicer areas, and may not need as much love; others are in the poorest of the poor areas, and need significantly more. Our goal is to shine just a little bit of light on them. Think of it as one part urban exploration, one part architectural study and one part cultural analysis.

I don’t expect to significantly change attitudes or eradicate their hardships. But if we can give them a little bit of press, a little bit of attention and love, well…then we’ve done our job.