The Faith and the City

Thanks to Mark for his post about "CST and the City."  What a rich subject!  For starters, I cannot resist (yet) another plug for Philip Bess's book, "Til We Have Built Jerusalem:  Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred."  Also on my must-read list would be Alan Ehrenhalt's "The Lost City" and John McGreevy's "Parish Boundaries." 

I do think -- and I mean no offense to my pals in suburbia -- that there is something "urban" about "the Catholic thing."  (Read the first chapter of Peter Ackroyd's "Life of Thomas More.")  Someone said (something like) that the heart of urban life is the "being together of strangers."  That line reminds me of the old-chestnut description of the Church:  "Here Comes Everybody."

For more MOJ posts on "urbanism", "new" and otherwise, click here, here, here, here, and here.

Let's run with this.  Ours is an incarnational, embodied faith.  Physical place, and space, has to matter to us.  (This is why, ahem, ugly churches are, well, bad.)  Mark?