Fr. Gregory Waldrop and art historian Joseph Connors ask whether the sacred needs architecture at all, tracing the idea through Hagia Sophia's famous dome. They also confront how many of history's most revered sacred buildings were built through violence, expropriation, or borrowed from another faith.

Reading the mosaics, legends, and contrasting chapels of Rome's sacred spaces — from St. Mary Major to Michelangelo's stark Sforza Chapel, feet away from the lavish Borghese Chapel. Closes with Fr. Waldrop's own work designing a minimalist chapel at Loyola, and Connors' story of two very different nights inside the same Jesuit church in Vienna.

Fr. Waldrop and Joseph Connors explore how the institutional church defines sacred space, the folk phenomenon of "miraculous" Madonnas that grow into full churches in Rome's forgotten neighborhoods, and a reflection on what sacred spaces offer believers and skeptics alike. They close with their own personal, decades-long bonds with two Roman churches.