No-places …

… The Metaphysical Nature of Our City Temples and Tombs | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Traveling around England in order to examine the new buildings that are being squeezed into our towns or dropped in our fields, asking myself why they are often so ugly and what might be done to change this, I have been struck by the physical difference between the old and the new. And I have been even more struck by a deeper metaphysical difference. The old buildings belong in the places that they create; the new buildings typically belong nowhere, and create a nowhere wherever they are constructed. Physically the old city center is a space; metaphysically, however, it is a place, a somewhere to which buildings, people and the institutions that unite them can belong. But the new developments are spaces that refuse to be places, spaces where nothing belongs.

I do not myself believe that my church houses the non-existent.