Highway to Heaven

At midday Friday, cars spill into the next-door church parking lot as worshippers crowd into a small mosque to pray salat al-jummah. The following evening, umbandistas gather with spirit mediums in a backyard field to commune with the orixás. Ten hours later, chanting and the lighting of incense marks the pre-dawn start of the local Ethiopian Orthodox Sunday mass.

In 1761, a Brookeville Episcopalian congregation finished construction of their new chapel, one of the first of its kind along New Hampshire Ave. Today, Montgomery County is the most religiously diverse in the country, and the chapel is one of over a hundred steeples, pagodas, minarets, domes, and shikharas on and around this road, known locally as the “Highway to Heaven.”

Highway to Heaven explores the changing religious landscape of this small county in New Hampshire Ave’s houses of worship and the symbols, talismans, rituals, and temples through which these communities mediate their relationship with the divine. Through these photographs, I look at what has led so many to make their weekly pilgrimage along this path - the places these communities have created for themselves, the people who have chosen to build their holy place on this consecrated land, and the bustling, winding road connecting them with one another.