Duncan G. Stroik designs and builds churches that are solid, inspiring, and timeless

South Bend, Ind.

‘Have you ever walked into a church and thought that it looks like a movie theater — something more secular than sacred?” asks the architect Duncan G. Stroik. He’s talking about the churches built over the last 50 or 60 years, ones that have followed the utilitarian commandments of modernism. “That’s what we’re rebelling against,” says Stroik. “A church shouldn’t be a mere ‘worship space,’ but rather a sermon in stone.”

Pope John Paul II would have understood what he means. In 1999, he visited Rome’s Church of San Mattia, built in the 1960s with the concrete-bunker aesthetic that

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