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

by Sheila Briggs, M. Shawn Copeland, Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, Linda Mercadante, Mark Lewis Taylor

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780800636821
Publisher:	1517 Media
Publication date:	08/05/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Sheila Briggs is an Associate Professor in the School of Religion at the University of Southern California. Among her current interests are slavery in early Christianity and religious and moral themes in cult television. She is co-editing a forthcoming handbook on feminists theology from Oxford University Press.

M. Shawn Copeland is professor emerita of systematic theology at Boston College. She has been president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. She has taught at Marquette University, Yale University Divinity School, and the Institute for Black Catholic Studies, Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans.

Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz was born and raised in La Habana, Cuba, and was Professor of Christian Ethics and Theology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and author of En la Lucha: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology (revised edition, Fortress Press 2004) and La Lucha Continues-Mujerista Theology (2004).

Linda Mercadante is B. Robert Straker Professor of Theology at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio. She holds her doctorate from Princeton Theological Seminary and is the author of Victims & Sinners: Spiritual Roots of Addiction and Recovery (1996) and Gender, Doctrine, and God: The Shakers and Contemporary Theology (1990).

Mark Lewis Taylor is the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is author of The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Fortress Press, 2001) and Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis. He is also editor of Paul Tillich: Theologian of the Boundaries (Fortress Press, 1991) and co-editor of Reconstructing Christian Theology (Fortress Press, 1994).

Kathryn Tanner is Frederick Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School. She is the author of numerous books, including Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity; Economy of Grace; Theories of Culture; and Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism.

Table of Contents

Preface

Kathryn Tanner

Taking the Train: A Theological Journey through Los Angeles County

Sheila Briggs, University of Southern California

A Theologian in the Factory: Toward a Theology of Social Transformation

M. Shawn Copeland, Boston College

Tasting the Bitter with the Sweet: The Spiritual Geography of Newark

Linda A. Mercadante, Methodist School of Theology

Degenerate Utopia in Philadelphia: Toward a Theology of Urban Transcendence

Mark Lewis Taylor, Princeton Theological Seminary

La Habana: The City That Inhabits Me

Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Drew Theological School