Parks’s 1955 photo essay, titled “The Monks of a Kansas Abbey Lead a Cloistered Life of Devotion,” was featured in a section of the magazine focused on “the new multitude of Christian sights and sounds that are everywhere across the U.S.” Parks’s photographs of the monks convey the intimacy that was already a hallmark of his career (by then he had been a staff photographer at Life for seven years), but they are also remarkable for conveying the enveloping meditative atmosphere of the Abbey. The images are quiet and solemn, reflecting and honoring lives devoted to prayer, study, and labor. Parks later gifted prints of his photographs to the Abbey, where they are housed to this day– a testament to his sensitive and mutually respectful approach.

The visit to Atchison was not Parks’s first assignment dedicated to the subject of religion. Just two years earlier, in 1953, he was sent to Chicago by Life to photograph the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church and its community in the city’s Near West Side—also intended for an issue focused on religion. The story was never published, but Parks was on record as both the photographer and the writer for the story. Like his photographs of St. Benedict’s Abbey, Parks’s images of the church’s services are remarkable for their intimate representation of a community’s devotion. In the unpublished manuscript written for Life, Parks described the church as a “great home in the wilderness” that must “quench the hot thirst for dignity and belonging.” Indeed, the search for dignity and belonging is conveyed through a great deal of the photographs Parks took throughout his career. His photographs of these two very different communities show that the search for faith is one of the many paths that unite us, regardless of differences.