On April 4, 1942, the diarist Henry “Chips” Channon and a few of his friends paid a visit to Wells Cathedral—one of England’s early Gothic treasures—in the southwest county of Somerset. Having spent ...

Gothic cathedrals were meant to overwhelm. And they do—even their secular-minded 21st-century visitors. Can we enter any other space in which ordinary sensory dimensions seem so stymied? Inside a ...