CST and the City

Mark -- It might be interesting to include a (long range) historical perspective in your CST and the City conference, too.  Maybe my perspective's warped a bit right now, because I'm still immersed in the Europe of late antiquity & the Middle Ages, but this came up in some class reading I'm doing this morning, from Christopher Dawson's Religion and the Rise of Western Culture:

The late Ernst Troeltsch, following Max Weber, went so far as to maintain that it was the medieval city which first provided the favourable conditions for a thorough-going Christianization of social life such as had existed neither in the city culutre of the ancient world, which was based on slavery, nor in the feudal agrarian society which had been built up so largely by the strong at the expense of the weak.

Dawson goes on to quote Troeltsch (from Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen):

The very condition of existence of the city as an essentially economic association is peace, the freedom and the common interest of all the citizens, together with freedom to work and the basing of property on personal effort and industry.

In all these respects the city corresponded to a great extent with the demands of Christian ethics.  As a non-military peaceful community of work, using the military element only for its defence and still devoid of capitalistic urban features, the medieval city was a pattern of Christian society as we find it in Thomist theory.

It also seems to me that this would be a conference where an international perspective might be particularly interesting and important.  The vast differences between what we as American Catholics experience as city life and what the inhabitants of cities such as Mexico City, Beijing, and Mumbai experience must have implications for CST.

Lisa