A Response to Atheism and the New Urbanism

In response to my student's post on Atheism and the New Urbanism, one reader wrote:

In response to your most recent Mirror of Justice post on atheism and urbanism, I wanted to share with you a thought I had recently:  The downtown Chicago Temple Building, home of the First United Methodist Church of Chicago, has a steeple and cross at the top.  When I first saw it a month ago, I suddenly realized that for all of human history, the biggest building in any community has been its house of worship.  Even here, in the birthplace of skyscrapers, the Temple Building was the tallest in Chicago, from 1924 to 1930.  Then it was surpassed by the Chicago Board of Trade, and now it is dwarfed by nearly all of the neighboring office buildings.

Approaching a medieval European town or an ancient Greek city or a vast Mayan metropolis, a visitor could see where the residents’ hope lay, as the steeples and hill-top temples proclaimed from miles away: “God dwells here.”  Chicago’s Sears Tower calls out only that humans live here, and the hope it offers is an economic prosperity that tellingly has eluded the corporation which erected the steel behemoth.  So here’s hoping that the top of the new Chicago Spire, which will spin higher into the air than the Sears Tower, looks more like a cross than a dollar sign.