The Crystal Cathedral

Last Saturday Bishop Tod Brown renamed the Crystal Cathedral, the well-known location of the "Hour of Power" televangelism program, to Christ Cathedral.

Because the design of the building is quite different from that of a traditional Catholic Church, and because the cost of maintenance will be so high, at first I was quite skeptical of the wisdom of this purchase.  Last night, though, I chanced across a passage in Chesteron's The Catholic Church and Conversion which presents the situation in a different, and more poetic light:

Now conversion consists very largely, on its intellectual side, in the discovery that all that picture of equal creeds inside an indifferent cosmos is quite false. It is not a question of comparing the merits and defects of the Quaker meeting-house set beside the Catholic cathedral. It is the Quaker meeting-house that is inside the Catholic cathedral; it is the Catholic cathedral that covers everything like the vault of the Crystal Palace; and it is when we look up at the vast distant dome covering all the exhibits that we trace the Gothic roof and the pointed windows.