1905: The Burning of Saint Thomas and the Crisis of Religion in Modern Manhattan

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The fire that destroyed Saint Thomas Church in August 1905 (which tragically repeated the 1851 burning of Saint Thomas’s original sanctuary) plunged the congregation into a double crisis. One concerned rebuilding. The New York Times headlined the challenge: “Saint Thomas’s Church a Fire-Swept Ruin,” and described it as resembling “some ancient Gothic ruin with the daylight yawning through the arches and windows.” Rebuilding was fraught with issues, no matter that Saint Thomas was “perhaps the richest congregation in the whole country,” as the Times put it. But the second, larger question concerned religion itself. For over two decades, New York’s Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders worried about religion’s fate amidst urban modernity. Would traditional religion shrink in the face of urban anonymity, unending immigration, multiplying pluralism, modern rationalism, the rise of science, and faceless bureaucratization? Indeed, had these forces already produced the “disenchantment of the world” as the German sociologist Max Weber opined? Yet across the next decades and up to World War II, Saint Thomas not only rebuilt, but new sanctuaries appeared, congregations multiplied, urban outreach flourished, religious publishing flourished, and a raft of theologians turned Manhattan into a 20^th century spiritual hothouse and the most vibrant religious center in all of America.

The Adult Education program at Saint Thomas Church offers sound Christian teaching presented with intellectual vigor, teaching that is grounded in Holy Scripture, mediated by the catholic tradition that is the inheritance of Anglicanism and set forth in the Book of Common Prayer. For more information about our theology program and to receive links for weekly Sunday Theology Talks, please contact Fr. Gioia.

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