Spirit In The Cities

"Moving as the spirit does, without regard for the usual boundaries of religious institution, spirits of resistance surface in nontraditional locations of religious questioning forces for humanization and regeneration [and] the formation of new communities that enable people to cope, survive, and hope ." —from the PrefaceIn recent decades economic dislocation, immigration, new architecture, and other forces have transformed the physical, social, and even religious landscape of large cities. There gleaming skyscrapers tower over struggling ghettos, abandoned businesses mar upscale shopping areas, and tall-steeple churches sometimes languish where storefront mosques thrive. Exploring the religious significance of this new urban landscape, the Workgroup on Constructive Theology traveled to select cities and found an exciting and vibrant and multivoiced new religious spirit at work there. In these essays five leading American theologians delve deeply into the contemporary spiritual geographies of five cities, capturing, through a mix of personal narrative, historical narrative, political analysis, and theological rumination, some sense of this new sacred space and the spirit aborning there. Preface 1. Tasting the Bitter with the Sweet: The Spiritual Geography of Newark 2. Degenerate Utopia in Philadelphia: Toward a Theology of Urban Transcendence 3. A Theologian in the Factory: Towards a Theology of Social Transformation 4. Taking the Train: A Theological Journey through Los Angeles County 5. La Habana: The City That Inhabits Me Kathryn Tanner is Professor of Theology at the Divinity School, University of Chicago, and author of God and Creation in Christian Theology (1988), The Politics of God (1992), Theories of Culture (1997), and Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity (2001). SPIRIT AND RESISTANCE: POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND AMERICAN INDIAN LIBERATION