Word: stoning
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Tommy Thompson Stone Mountain...
Practicality and a Puritan bias toward plainness have made the white clapboard church, not the soaring stone spire, the nation's quintessential symbol of worship. Yet some Americans prefer to honor God in grandeur. One was George Washington, who dreamed of "a great church for national purposes in the capital city." It was only a century later that members of his Episcopal Church began making plans to build a towering Gothic cathedral atop the highest point of land in the District of Columbia...
...Washington visitor with time to wander in the cathedral this summer will find continual surprises. More than a thousand kneeling cushions, each in elaborately individualized needlepoint. Stone tributes not just to biblical heroes but to Sören Kierkegaard, David Livingstone, Albert Schweitzer and Jane Addams. Even a carved snake in the choir with a caricatured head of Hitler. A space-age window in which a sliver of a moon rock is encased. On the roof, growling gargoyles, and on the lawn, an oversized gilded bronze statue of Washington astride a horse...
...project has already cost $50 million, and it will require at least $12 million more. By Washington-style accounting, that works out to be little more than half of a B-l bomber or a few miles of interstate highway. Dean Sayre, who often uses his carved Gothic stone pulpit to promote social justice, makes no apologies for the expense. "You're not competing with the poor for a dollar," he has said. "You're building something in order to use it. The instrument and the using of the instrument are equally important...
...reason for urgency is that cathedral artisans are a dying breed. No two stones in the edifice are alike. Hand-crafted from Indiana Limestone, they are put in place by the 25 skilled stonemasons now on the site. Then there are the eleven stone carvers. The occasional quick temper of the master of the group, Roger Morigi, 68, is immortalized in a carving by a colleague: a Morigi-like head has an atomic bomb cloud forming over it. The stone carvers work under the alert eye of John Fanfani, 52, who is the son and nephew of two carvers...