"The Christian’s action must be specifically Christian. Christians must never identify themselves with this our that political or economic movement. Rather, they must bring to social movements what they alone can provide." (Ellul, Violence)

Something I've thought about quite a fair amount since shifting to working outside of the church is the question of what role the church might still play in today's social movements. It's something I explored in more detail in this essay looking at how the church can and should support worker's rights. There I suggest that the church needs to first adopt a posture of hospitality (both giving and receiving it) in relation to the rest of society.

We are facing a handful of immense—and interconnected—existential threats. Any hope we have in solving or surviving them requires us working together. They will also call many of us to self-sacrifice on behalf of others and to rely on community. Capitalism will not get us there. It cannot. But within many of our religions, there are truths here we can reclaim. This includes Christianity.

But not a Christianity that is nearly indistinguishable from capitalism. Of that, the church needs to repent.

"In the eyes of many people, love of the poor seems better expressed and incarnated by socialists than by Christians.” (Ellul, Violence)

There was a moment, quite a number of years ago, that signalled a fairly significant change in my life. It was a decision that marked the end of over a decade of working within the structural church. During my time there, I had committed to cultivating a love for others that inspired action—in both myself and those I worked with. Yet I kept bumping up against a tension that I didn't quite know what to do with. It seemed clear that Christianity was well positioned to provide care for individuals suffering from injustice or oppression; but in the face of the economic and social systems that caused that injustice, it felt painfully inadequate.

Now, this is a weighty topic that I'm not about to solve. What I wanted to offer here was a personal reflection around this tension that signalled a change in my life. One that led me from the church into other spaces. It was not a decision that I came to lazily or out of some crisis of faith. If anything, it was driven by idealism. It's also something I am still wrestling with. I claim no definitive answer to these questions.

My goal in reading through Ellul (along with some other authors right now) is to spend some time reflecting on the 21st century (North American) church in light of current events and what seems like a massive betrayal of the faith they claim to hold.

"The major challenge to neighbourhood, as a demographic-physical construct as well as a viable social network, comes from organizations and institutions (firms and bureaucracies) whose routine functioning reorganizes urban space. The stranger to fear may not be the man of different ethnicity on the street corner, but a bank president or property management executive far from view.”

From Logan and Molotch.

My prof used to say something similar around how the person to fear is not the individual suffering from mental health illness on the corner but the executives in their big shiny buildings. This is why it's always important to be able to read the power dynamics of a community through the lens of who suffers and who benefits.

Places are not discovered, they're built.

I've been working through Logan and Molotch's 'Urban Fortunes: the Political Economy of Place' over the last couple weeks. It's been a bit slow (partially because I'm also reading through the Wheel of Time in my third attempt to get through the massive 13 book series); but I'm making progress.

One argument that they are making in the book is that how we define a place, how it comes to be, is a social construction largely based upon a tension between use and exchange values. Use values are all the ways the place you live in impacts your daily life, while exchange values is what that place is worth as a commodity. These values come about through all sorts of human efforts and activities, but the main point is that what makes a place a place is a constantly evolving thing driven by social action. It is through this social action that inequalities in class are both created and maintained.

"High status within the social hierarchy can bring access to the most desirable places (for residence or investment) and a guarantee of a rewarding future for whatever place one controls. At the same time a high status for one's geographical place means the availability of resources (rents, urban services, prestige) that enhance life chances generally."

You can really get a sense of how this all works out when you look at things through the lens of raising kids in a particular locale. Home values end up being directly tied to the quality of other aspects of society (better and more available green space, school sizes and quality, daycare, proximity to pollution, etc). Your income defines your ability to afford the place you raise your kids which has an impact on the resources available to your kids to help them lead healthier, happier, and more possible lives.

While none of this is a new idea, I think what matters here is to keep Logan and Molotch's argument in front of us: this is all made through social action. And as such, can be unmade.

I've been doing this self-guided urban theory reading course over the last little while (with a few intermissions) and this week's reading is from Jane Jacobs. I've read The Death and Life of Great American Cities before, but it's nice to revisit it. This morning I was reading from the chapter on the role of city sidewalks in assimilating kids into public life and was wondering if this is true anymore.

"In real life, only from the ordinary adults of the city sidewalks do children learn—if they learn at all—the first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson nobody learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of public responsibility for you."

Granted, I don't live in a large city, but it seems to me that the notion of public responsibility has so eroded that I'm not sure there's much left to be assimilated into. Something I write about often here is the dynamic between public and private life and the sort of collapsing of the two into each other. A big fan of Hannah Arendt, I like her idea that the public realm has become primarily about protecting private interests. This gives me a helpful way of understanding the loss of public responsibility for one another.

A while back I noted this idea of collective, or shared, responsibility in keeping kids safe; but it's interesting to also think about this as Jacobs did on the shared responsibility of helping kids learn public responsibility. Specifically, how this can't really be taught. It needs to be seen and experienced. But how can kids learn something that they can no longer see?