Bess on "The Architecture of an Urbanist Natural Law Principle"

Longtime MOJ readers might remember that I am a fan of my colleague (and others') work connecting urbanism/architecture with Christian anthropological claims.  Here is a new essay by Bess, in the (great) Church Life Journal, called "The Architecture of an Urbanist Natural Law Principle."  Among other things, Bess engages Pope Francis's encyclical Laudato Si'.  Bess notes:

The fundamental anthropological assumption of Laudato Si’ is that the human being is most truly understood as an intermediate being, both part of and transcending the natural order. This mediating status affords human beings both objective privileges and objective obligations of stewardship, but a strong and pervasive obstacle hampers our stewardship.

Bess then works from this assumption to some "thoughts about an integral human ecology at a scale less-than-global, less-than-national, but greater-than-a-building: viz., the scale of an integral local human ecology, the scale of cities and their adjacent landscapes."  Check it out.