The Geometry of Love: Space, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church Kindle Edition

A beautiful narrative description of a church dedicated to one of the saintly persons of Christianity. The explanations are simple yet profound. The descriptive explanations are clear and easily understood. A thorough and in depth exploration of the meanings of Christianity as depicted in the architecture of a church.

I read this book before going to Rome for the first time, and was moved to take the #60 bus out the Via Nomentana to the churches described: Sant' Agnese and Santa Costanza. As marvelous as that day trip was to see catacombs, mosaics, and bell tower, the internal journey that the book inspired with its skillfully woven sources and stories of these ancient churches was even more profound and illuminating. Starting with a single place, Visser illuminates eternal universal truths about the sacred and the trajectories of our souls. I was grateful to read it and then to visit Rome to feel it yet again.

This book is a profound mediation on the church of Sant'Agnese fuori le mura, on the saint herself, on martyrdom, on the Christian life. And it is a must-read for anyone who wants to go to Rome. It's worth going out to the church with this book in hand.Alas, it seems to be out of print. I would beg for a new edition, one with illustrations of the church.

I knew about the book and I visited Sant’Agnese before. When I planned my most recent visit, I made sure tot was this book. The book is rich, and almost indispensible for any visit. One can even read it without visiting the church and site to get a thorough impression of its beauty and its complex and interesting historical context.

This book is an in-depth discussion of the meaning of church architecture from a laymans (lay woman's, in this case)perspective. As Visser points out, someone on the "inside" of a faith--in her case, Christianity-- does tend to have insights into the meaning of its traditions that an outside observer might not. This book is full of little insights that are just astounding at times. However, Visser tends to wax poetic on the glories of Christianity every third sentence or so, which makes reading this book for the purpose of studying architecture more of a crapshoot and less of a solid learning experience. By all means, if you need a reinforcement of why your Christian faith is so amazing, get this book. If you want a good in-depth discussion of Christian architecture without having to sit through a sermon, this is probably not the book for you.

In her illuminating, unique study of an ordinary Roman church that has an extraordinary history, Visser is both scholarly and spiritual as she guides the reader through the symbolic space of buildings made holy by prayer.

This could have been a terrific guide to absolutely everything in the fine old Roman church of Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura, but instead it bogs down in mystical meanderings and fifth-rate philosophizing. These aspects of the book might be of interest to those who actually believe such things, but for me it just produced eye-rolling. I found myself skimming page after page and saying impatiently to the author, "Will you please just get on with it!" There's a great guidebook to Sant' Agnese in there somewhere, but the information is buried among all the other pious maundering that bloats the book to over 250 pages. There are enough footnotes and a long enough bibliography that this could almost be a PhD dissertation! The only way it would be of any use as a guide book would be to go through it with a highlighter, and mark the passages of relevance to the church itself, while ignoring the interminable sermonizing.

Most pages underlined which is distracting

never bought a copy of this book - dont know why it is on my review list.