Urban theology: Is it different? Should it be?
Not far from the pedestrian entrance to Fordham University’s campus in the Bronx is one of the boldest signs in all of New York. In a city not known for subtlety, even this one stands out as uncannily direct: Butt Boosting Jeans. In the accompanying photo I have spared you the window-shopping, where you could see the means by which your pompis might be exalted, but I’ve made sure to capture the Spanish (and actual) name of the store for those of you interested in, ahem, learning more.
An uplifting message
Fordham Road is a boisterous place, especially in summer. There are many days where it wouldn’t be exaggerating to call it a cacophonous, sweaty mass of humanity. On this clamorous commercial strip it’s often difficult to take note of anything except what’s directly at hand. Nonetheless I’ve noticed the sign many times, and today, strangely, it got me thinking about theology. Specifically, how is it that one does theology in this environment? How does the urban-ness of one’s surroundings affect one’s emphases, methods, and conclusions?
There’s an old Latin saying about some of the charismatic founders of Christian orders which ends: “Ignatius loved the great cities.” Here in the Bronx the Jesuit scholastics in formation maintain their residence, Ciszek Hall, just a few paces off Fordham Road, adjacent to a huge tattoo parlor (though not the one featured in the photo) and on the same block as a mosque. Ignatius Loyola would have loved Fordham Road for all its urbanity — perhaps even the Butt Boosting Jeans store. They certainly don’t have that one in the suburbs or the country.
I confess, however, to having idealized notions of theological thinking that takes place in placid or even wilderness environments. Immanuel Kant barely ever left his hometown. Great thinkers from Jesus to Thomas Merton to Kathleen Norris have fled to the wilderness in search of solitude for prayer and insight. And yet others, such as Paul, Ignatius Loyola, and Dorothy Day have flourished in the cities. I always identified more with the Jesus-Merton-Norris crowd. I sometimes find it hard even to breathe in New York.
After a few years of doing theology here in the Bronx, I’ve noticed a few changes in myself. First, I have found natural theology to be less a part of my thinking and spirituality than before. The sacramental worldview of “grace mediated through nature” or “finding God in all things” usually presented itself to me through experiences of mountains, rivers, big skies by day, and shooting stars by night. As a high school teacher in Colorado (at the “other” Regis), I used to have a west-facing classroom with expansive views of the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. We would turn our desks westward to read the poetry of Hopkins — who wouldn’t have? The world was “charged with the grandeur of God.” Nature was “never spent.” The last lights did really “off the black West went,” and from the other side of the school we could really see “morning, at the brown brink, eastward” springing. God, it was easy to teach sacramental theology in Colorado.
But when everything here is made by human hands, even the “natural” spaces like the nearby Botanical Garden and Bronx Zoo, it is easy for the human person to become the measure of things. Urban life, for better and worse, is about people. Grace mediated through nature comes to mean grace mediated through other people. That’s still Christian natural theology, but it sure feels different.
I’ve also noticed that the emphases of my christological thinking have changed. As primarily a teacher of New Testament, it’s not that my textual resources have changed. But where I used to focus on Jesus in the rural countryside — the Galilean wonder-worker, the wisdom teacher of the inner life, revealing God through mustard seeds and spinning lilies — I’m now drawn more to his teachings about social ethics. I read the same old texts, but now I see the moneychangers in the Temple, I see the socio-economic statuses of the Pharisees, tax collectors, widows, and politicians. I used to meditate on the agriculture parables of Mark 4. Now I can’t get the economic teachings of Luke 16 out of my head. How can I, when they’re before my eyes every day? The only mustard I see comes from a hot dog cart. The only fields I see are used for sports. But the Rich Man passing by Lazarus — I see both men every day, and I am one of them. Every day.
Others have written more eloquently about what I’ve just said, about how all theology, like all politics, is local and contextual. We can’t help being shaped by our quotidian contexts. I don’t know that I’ll have a grand theory about this to add to the discussion of contextual theologies, but I can say that urbanity has fundamentally shifted my theological engagement. I’m wondering if it has for any of you.
St. Paul, St. Ignatius Loyola, and Servant of God Dorothy Day, pray for us.
“…all theology, like all politics, is local and contextual.” Is this perhaps an explanation for why the hierarchy is so completely out of touch with the life most of us lead? Hunger, homelessness, joblessness, economic injustice, addiction, no access to healthcare, no access to adequate education and the American bishops are launching a crusade against a political foe who has failed to show them due defference.
It always seems to devolve into a fight for money or power——and the “fortnight for freedom” is no different.
” Great thinkers from Jesus to Thomas Merton to Kathleen Norris have fled to the wilderness in search of solitude for prayer and insight. And yet others, such as Paul, Ignatius Loyola, and Dorothy Day have flourished in the cities. I always identified more with the Jesus-Merton-Norris crowd. I sometimes find it hard even to breathe in New York.”
I just want to mention that there is also a tradition of anchorites/anchoresses, who kinda/sorta melded the two ways of life: my understanding is that they built cells to dwell in that were attached to churches in cities and towns. There was no door to the cell, so they were in it for the duration. But there was a window on either side: one would open into the church, so that they could attend mass; the other would open onto the town street or square, not only so that they could receive provisions, but so that townspeople could consult them for spiritual direction.
Thank you for a generously written post. On my many trips to New York I have often wondered, while meandering about, if my life long commitment to theological reflection is just plain odd given the sheer otherness of the bustle of urban life. I console myself with something Merton jotted down in one of his notebooks: Nobody has ever invented a perfect way of wasting time.
A number of significant experiences in the life of Ignatius Loyola did not take place in an urban setting.
One other thing living (or spending time) in the city does is bring me into contact with people who practice other faiths — and with people from other ethnic backgrounds who practice the same faith as I do but in a way I hardly recognize. I wouldn’t call myself a theologian, but those encounters certainly challenge and broaden my own notions of who God is and how God works.
There’s plenty of stuff on cable about getting “Brazilian butts” that the Bronx store is hardly a surprise.
Fordham and the SJs have an excellent record of creatively reaching out to the poor in New York -a recent Fordham magazine as I recall had a fine piece on their works with schools.
In today’s Church, the notion of service on the margins, unfortunately, seems to be a source of division.
It ties into the canonical/pastoral divide issue that continues to arise.
And points to a big question of how leadership is formed and confirmed in comunity.
Ah, the great wave of humanity! I can feel the energy as I cross the George Washington Bridge. There’s a rhythm to it, a buzz. Like bees in a hive. There’s nothing to do but let yourself get carried away with it, and know yourself as an integral part of something very big and confusing and wonderful.
Paul’s best letters were sent to Corinth. a beehive as Beth notes..
Thanks Michael for a wonderfully rich post. A good friend who lives just outside Taos, NM, recently said to me, after noting the stark differences between the high desert landscape of Taos and the “man-centered” ambience of places like New York City, “You can’t make a big thing of yourself in New Mexico. It shrinks everybody down. People come and go, a lot of famous people, but it’s still here.” As you intimate, Michael, in your references to teaching at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, so he described that feeling of “smallness” in the desert of NM as a good thing. I find myself unconsciously, perhaps comically, trying to reproduce the “feel” of the Rocky Mountain west in my urban backyard here in Cincinnati – whether my small grove of aspens will survive the soil here is another question!
Ah yes. The pedestrian entrance to Fordham Road. I remember when, back in the day, Ammon Hennacy from the Catholic Worker used to stand there– in good weather and bad– hailing passersby with the good news that his” Catholic peace paper” only cost a penny. And we graduate students gathered in the” H,” the soda shop under the Third Avenue El, to discuss religion, philosophy, literature, and the state of the world– while flirting innocently over coffee sodas with chocolate ice cream. It didn ‘t feel like an alien, urban hive at all. But then I was” born and bred in the briar patch”– at least the relatively green and leafy one at Fordham’s back door up in Bedford Park.
I’m not at all sure that living in the country makes one more human or allows one to become more human. Are country people as funny as city ones? Have there been many great comedians or comic writers from rural areas? Surely comedy is humanizing. Or is it always?
The urbane are often the most appreciative of nature. Petrarch was the first since antiquity to climb a mountain purely for the view. At the summit of France’s Mount Ventoux he pondered a passage from Augustine: “People are moved to wonder by mountain peaks, by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfalls on rivers, by the all-embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolutions of the stars. But in themselves they are uninterested.”
Burckhardt claimed that Petrarch’s ascent of this mountain inaugurated the modern age. As one might expect, all scholars are not in agreement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascent_of_Mont_Ventoux
Susan Gannon: I met Ammon Hennacy on my first visit to NYC as a college student – he was selling the CW in front of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. I bought a copy and later subscribed as I still do five decades later.
I live in a village where I could stand in the road for an hour without a car passing and see cornfields at the end of the road in both directions. (And if I were to do so, it would be noted and commented upon by the neighbors and likely chalked up to my being a Democrat.)
I have never failed to encounter tolerance and decency from urban dwellers, whether in Detroit, London, Montreal, Edinburgh, New Orleans, Ottawa, or Toronto when I have had to go to such places for business or educational requirements. Possibly this is because I look like a harmless moron.
One of the most charming people I ever met in my life was a student at Victoria Station in London. We ended next to each other on the train. We practiced doing each other’s accents and laughed ourselves silly. She warned me away from the train food and gave me half her cheese and pickle sandwiches. I reciprocated by buying the beverages.
That’s not to say that city folks are always friendly or polite, but I find them charming even when they’re snide. There was a guy with a pinky ring and duck tail in Chicago’s Union Station one time who walked me over to the commuter train I needed. “I hope you get there, lady, ’cause so far you’re not doin’ too good.”
In cities I guess you learn to recognize Christ in many forms.
The sky, at least, is always there, even when we are fighting our way in a dense crowd. Isn’t that why Jesus and others usually “raise their eyes” when they address a prayer to the Father?
It seems to me that the agricultural parables, and the images about fishing, shepherding, etc., spoke to people for more than 1800 years but stopped being straightforward after the industrial revolution, and became even more remote in recent decades. I always wonder whether that is one reason any the church seems to have lost its ability to transmit the faith. For example, how can we imagine the Nativity if we have no experience of what a stable smells like?
I was raised in the “rural church.” It was far from being diverse (you were either Irish, German or a prod) and there was really no challenge to what you were told to believe.
I wonder how many bishops come from that kind of background (Lincoln would be an odious examply) where their early faith was formed in a hothouse. Encountering the “different” or “other” might be beyond the ken of that kind of formation. I don’t count studying in Rome as the different or other either, just more of the same in a funny language.
Thanks for a lovely, thoughtful and thought-provoking post. I’m no theologian but here are a couple of things that came to my while reading it:
1 – City life provides almost endless opportunities for meditating on the mystery of the Incarnation. Sitting on a bus, standing on a subway platform, walking down the street or through a park—there is something of God’s beauty and power and goodness in each person one sees. Astounding when you think of it, and a constant challenge (for some of us) to broaden and deepen our understanding of God and humanity and creation.
2 – An Advent sermon by a former pastor (a Jesuit, as it happens) in which he preached about our peculiar (and peculiarly American) “holiday season” with all its busyness and commercial hype. One thing we know for sure about the first Christmas (paraphrasing here) is that while it was certainly a “holy night”, it also was not by any stretch of the imagination a “silent night”—a poor family on the move—along with everyone else because of imperial dictates—the overcrowded “place where travelers lodged”, the animals, the shepherds, whatever the heavenly host was doing that night…there was a lot going on and not much of it was silent, including the labor and delivery.
God is there in the midst of it all. Likewise, God is there in the midst of the cacophany of Fordham Road and the side streets, in all the overcrowded apartments and stores—including the tattoo parlor and “Colombia Jeans Levantapompis”.
Michael, if Fordham Road grasps you thus what do you say about Times Square and Broadway at night where the sky surely disappears? Does any place get you closer to heaven than the Empire State Building or the Top of the Rock? Didn’t Jesus mix it up with his drinking and dining with the people while seeking the mountains at night? One thing alarming about the suburbs is the apparent absence of people on the streets while in urban tenements life seems much more alive while too often irritating.
Shifting to the topic of sex but perhaps germane to this thread is the historically most popular novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” which is taking the nation (and the world) by storm. Mostly women and the reason given is there is something in the novel that is most appeal despite the sado-masochism relationship of the star couple. Some opine that women relate to it because of the sumptuous life the fabulously rich male lavishes on the previously unsophisticated and virginal female. But really it is a fabulous love store notwithstanding (or perhaps in large part due to) the abundant erotic description. Some say pornographic.
So far no Catholic theologian or writer has attempted to relate this momentous event to Christian or Catholic marriage. Can you do it Michael?
I am sure that multitudes of Catholic women are reading this book sub rosa. But I have not found anything on Google search. One thing is for sure a condemnation by the bishops is not necessary for the sale of this trilogy which has or will surpass Harry Potter in sales.
In days pf yore, there were even offices of special ministries in urban areas, for example to the poor or minorities, in rural areas to to the special neds of farmers, dairymen.
I;m almost te,pyred today that we are more attached at the top to where the big money is)
Those pld offoces wer egrpinded in service and pastoral care.
Theology has drifyed towards more canonicalism IMO.
BTW, sex always sells – think of the Moon Is B;lue foofaraw years ago and how the standard brands Church reaction tended to increase its popularity.
Credibilityu matters. not just reciting a cathechism.
Dear Michael,
At the end of your post you wonder if/how urbanity shapes theological perspectives of your readers.
In response to the question you may find the following texts from Latin@ theologians and biblical scholars useful:
Carmen Nanko-Fernández, “Creation: A Cosmo-politan Perspective,” In Our Own Voices: Latino/a Renditions of Theology. Ed. Benjamin Valentin. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010, 41-63. http://www.amazon.com/In-Our-Own-Voices-Renditions/dp/1570758905/ref=pd_sim_b_3
Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Readings from the Edges: The Bible and People on the Move (Orbis, 2011)
http://www.amazon.com/Readings-Edges-People-Studies-Catholicism/dp/1570759448
David A. Sanchez, From Patmos to the Barrio: Subverting Imperial Myths (Fortress, 2008) http://www.amazon.com/From-Patmos-Barrio-Subverting-Imperial/dp/0800662598/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1339777511&sr=1-1&keywords=David+Sanchez+Patmos
For some scholars in our Latin@ theological community the city is context and lens for our theologizing.
All the best.
Carmen
Forget the jeans, and look at the sign above. “Body Piercing” — think of the many historical ramifications there, from St. Sebastian on — wars, torture chambers, executions, and so on.
Nicholas -very interesting. Body piercing bugs me. It strikes me as an act of self-loathing – sort of on the slippery slope to cutting. I’m sure I’m being way too paranoid.
” I’m sure I’m being way too paranoid. ”
Yes, you are. Stupidity is not the same as self-loathing.
What are your thoughts about “tats?”
I’m not a tattoo guy, either. Why mar the human body that way? If folks want to adorn their body, I recommend clothing.
When Rebekah wore the nose ring Abraham’s servant gave her, it was no doubt an act of self-loathing.
By coincidence today’s parables where about the grain and the mustard seed, and in the church where I went the homily started thus: “I am a city man. I know nothing of the countryside, and I hate spending time away from the city. I know nothing about grain and agriculture. But have you ever watched, on some documentary on TV, a closeup of a plant growing, sped up thousands of times? I have, and it is an amazing sight.”
were!