Faith in the city

For Religious Geography of New York, I'm having students read Robert Orsi's introduction to his pioneering anthology, Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape (1999). It's an amazing synthesis of history and urban studies, which argues that American religion - which tends to celebrate the rural - shaped and was shaped by a love-hate relationship with the urban. It's a complicated argument, full of ironies. Here's a taste:

For two hundred year, despite (or perhaps because of) the ceaseless urbanizing of the population, the city was cast as the necessary mirror of American civilization, and fundamental categories of American reality - whiteness, heterosexuality, domestic virtue, feminine purity, middle class respectability - were constituted in opposition to what was said to exist in cities. (5)

[C]ity people in the United States have always had to live in other people's ideas of where they live as well as in real places on the ground... Spaces on the urban landscape are both geographical sites where real people live and constructions of terror and desire among those who live elsewhere, including elsewhere in the city. (6)

Mainline American religion worries that people lose their moorings in the welter of diversity and temptation of the city. In fact, Orsi suggests, cities are sites for religious innovation and exploration - in part precisely because they provide so highly ramified an experience. That's sort of the point of my class, so I hope the students get it!