Spirit in the Cities: Searching for Soul in the Urban Landscape

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, a group of theologians, members of the Workgroup on Constructive Christian Theology, traveled to select cities and found an exciting, vibrant, and multivoiced religious spirit at work. In these essays five leading American theologians delve deeply into the contemporary spiritual geographies of five cities, capturing, through a mix of personal and historical narrative, political analysis, and theological rumination, a sense of this new sacred space and the spirit aborning there.