Leonard Hjalmarson, DMin

Geography is simply a visible form of theology. (Levenson 1985, 116)

How do we get to know our cities? How do we identify the spirit of a place? What theological and social frameworks will contribute to our understanding? I began to sketch these in my first post on July 27. Our theological frames are likely to be diverse, shaped by the contexts and traditions which shape us, and so the complexity of our analysis becomes uniquely dialogical and contextual. As we began writing The Soul of the City, I realized that we were writing at the intersection of phenomenology, human geography, urban ethnography and theology. Who is adequate for such a task?

It turns out we are all ethnographers, and all theologians. These reflective tasks belong naturally in the church. We began by reflecting on our cities in terms of what we call the spiritual geography, extending the theological task into an exploration of how context impacts faith. We use the word “context” to describe a particular environment, including, but not limited to, the physical dimensions. We include the historical, economic, social and cultural factors. Not only does context impact belief but also it provides a window (perhaps, an “imaginary”) through which one may relate to God. Moreover, the rise of virtual and networked space complicates context. The authors of Networked Theology remind us that “geography becomes irrelevant as time-space barriers dissolve.” (Campbell & Garner, 2016, 89)

When we extend the theological task to discern the spiritual geography of a place, we highlight the interweave of attitudes and environment, postures and politics, and the ways this interweave calls to the spirit or denigrates it. These things are commonly felt as intangibles, and are difficult to identify and articulate. Theology is a reflective task because it asks questions and makes statements it cannot understand. It’s the nature of the craft. But our work helps us evaluate the human environment at levels that are more than merely phenomenological. It contributes to the richness of a spiritual vocabulary rooted in the rough and tumble of life, “sails and ships and ceiling wax” (Carroll, 1872). It is not just holy places which inspire us, but places which inspire us to become holy: they transform our human journey into a pilgrimage.

Linda Mercadante (2004) warns that discerning the spirit of a place could be reduced to a vague delineation of how a place is or is not conducive to human flourishing. She offers two safeguards to this tendency. First, the awareness that God is continually trying to reach us, to break through our defenses, and to offer divine grace. Second, as Calvin stressed, that God accommodates to our condition. “Our particularity creates the need for God to come to us in ways we can understand, and . . . God has the consummate ability to do this” (Mercadante 2004, 62).

The most fundamental way God has met us is in the Incarnation. The Incarnation combined the human and divine, matter and spirit, and was preeminently a phenomenon of spatiality. Jesus was placed, a first century Jew meeting us in place and time. This may cue us to some important questions relative to our urban contexts. The physical space of our humanity is not just flesh and blood, but also steel and glass. Our bodies do not interact socially apart from physical places (though digital technology is a new kind of mediation). And in the nature of culture itself, our bodies participate in both a natural environment and cultural artifacts, so that the city is more than mere container, as place is more than space. The city is us.

There are a few other things to consider as you seek to understand your city. The city remains both graced and fallen. In his chapter in this book Rob Crosby-Shearer notes of Victoria that there are “shadows in paradise.” Later in this book, Cory Seibel describes the darker “frontier” realities of Edmonton noting that these are “acute manifestations of phenomena that occur across the life of the city.” Each of our cities needs this kind of nuanced mapping.

We can provide our cities with this assisted by the social critique of writers like Zizek, Baumann, and Chomsky. In Zizek, for example, the “both/and” experiences in our cities are called “irruptions.” This enables him to move beyond the external psychological sign of an inner disturbance in his discussion of social symptoms (Zizek, 1989).

For Zizek, a symptom can work within a culture to expose an unfulfilled drive, the unspoken void around which that culture has been formed. “An image, an explosion of media activity surrounding an event, a popular movie, a flurry of publishing can expose something hidden and unspoken that drives a culture’s meaning system” (Hesiak, 2007). What we see and hear on the surface may be compensations for what the culture itself lacks at its core. Exposing these kinds of Zizekian symptoms in our cities opens them up for change and transformation.

For Zizek, cultural symbolic orders exist to legitimize something; as such they are ideologies. These meaning systems mask an absence which no one wants to face. So every cultural system is prone to “irruptions of the Real” which reflect back to its participants what is hidden within the ongoing system of meaning. Thus the homeless populations amidst capitalist societies reveal the immanent logic of the politic of capitalism. This is poignantly clear in the chapter in this book penned by Spurgeon D. Root and Nick Helliwell, but features in a number of chapters in this book. Capitalist ideology may say that its goal is to rid humanity of all poverty, but Zizek would suggest that the homeless person reveals the true drive behind capitalism, the way it plays upon the fear of poverty and the fear that we all might become homeless if we don’t work harder. Global capitalism is a force that impacts the soul of every large Western city, and its symptoms are available to any observer.

Finally, it’s important to keep in mind that, while the city has always been amenable to new technologies, digital culture and new media are impacting our communities as never before. To the extent that these expressions of connectivity work against our neighbourly relationships they may act as a solvent to social capital. But the knife cuts both ways. To the extent that new technologies empower connection they may also lead to renewed civic engagement, a richer expression of the soul. The role of Twitter in the Occupy movement, as in the Arab Spring, are cases in point. Social geographers watch these developments with interest. Private space and public space are giving way to something like connected space, the in-between land of the other city that never sleeps: the Internet. The soul of the city is also found in virtual space.

REFERENCES

Campbell, Heidi A. & Garner, Stephen. (2016). Networked Theology: Negotiating Faith in Digital Culture. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic.
Carroll, Lewis. (1872). “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” In Through the Looking Glass. London: 1871.
Hesiak, Jason. (2007, November 1). “Zizek and Evangelicals in America.” Retrieved from
http://churchandpomo.typepad.com/conversation/2007/11/zizek-and-evang.html
Levenson, Jon D. (1985). Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible. Minneapolis: Winston Press.

Lynch, Kevin. (1960). The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mercadante, Linda. (2004). Tasting the Bitter with the Sweet. In Kathryn Tanner (Ed.), Spirit in the Cities (pp. 47-68), Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
Project for Public Spaces. (2012). “Creativity and Place-Making: Building Inspiring Centers of Culture.” Retrieved from
https://www.pps.org/reference/creativity-placemaking-building-inspiring-centers-of-culture/
Zizek, Slavoj. (1989).The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso Books.