Spirit In The Cities

In 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 chapters, 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.