A Praiseworthy Map of America's Heavenly Place Names

Earlier this year, data artist Jonathan Hull brewed up a brimstone-stinking map of America's satanically named landmarks. Obviously the Salt Lake City resident has decided to drop his dark experiments and walk the righteous path, for he's now released a map of place names inspired by all things heavenly – from New York's Christmas Knob to Illinois's Christian County to North Carolina's Holy Ghost Drive.

Hull intended his "Heaven USA Map" to ring in Christmas 2013 (for some reason, the country harbors a significant number of Christmas-themed sites). He plotted the coordinates of more than 3,000 paradisaical places by searching for variations of "heaven," "god," "Jesus," "church," and the like. If nothing else, his cartographic effort proves that Americans, like much of the Western world, love to give geographic shout-outs to the saints. There's the Midwest's copious tributes to the Norwegian Saint Olaf, for instance, and Florida's slightly redundant St. Francis Dead River Run. Hull also found that heavenly appellations tend to cluster in areas colonized by the French and Spanish and also in populated regions, which he notes stands "in contrast to the clustering of devils in remote and rugged terrain of the country."