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What People Are Saying
“It is a paradox of our age: We have endless information at our fingertips but struggle to see how things fit together. We can only deal now, really, with fragmented realities. We are baffled, even troubled, by phenomena that represent well-thought-out, coherent wholes. Our medieval cathedrals are such wholes. In this companionable book, Bishop Barron helps us consider their beauty and understand their ordered charm. He prepares us better to appreciate these monuments of old, but he does more; he gently indicates a specifically Christian way of living in the world.”
—Bishop Erik Varden, author of Towards Dawn: Essays in Hopefulness and Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses
“Bishop Robert Barron has gifted the world with a winsome and compelling paean to Gothic architecture in his work Heaven in Stone and Glass. Shaking off the dust of neglect and ignorance from these venerable churches, Bishop Barron explores the exquisite symbolic poetry of rose windows, stained glass, and flying buttresses, inviting readers to see Gothic cathedrals as glorious storybooks, recounting the wondrous story of salvation through light, color, form, and human creativity.”
—Elizabeth Lev, art historian and author of How Catholic Art Saved the Faith: The Triumph of Beauty and Truth in Counter-Reformation Art
“A Gothic cathedral is a ‘story’ to be ‘read,’ yet a story told in a symbolism that even to the contemporary Christian mind remains opaque. With his keen sensitivity to the way of beauty, and with the theologian’s deep understanding of Christian iconography, Bishop Barron shows us how, for example, the interior of Notre-Dame in Paris serves as a kind of womb, a place of gestation and birth; how the rose window of Chartres functions as a picture of the well-ordered soul; and how even the playful weirdness of gargoyles, hybrid grotesques, are comic types of the Son of God made flesh. Heaven in Stone and Glass constitutes a pilgrimage of the imagination to some of the greatest masterpieces in the Christian tradition, and like all good pilgrimages, its ultimate aim is to take you into the very heart of Christ. What better guide for such a pilgrimage than Bishop Robert Barron!”
—Daniel McInerny, author of Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts and of the novel The Good Death of Kate Montclair