Religion and community in the new urban America PDF
Preview Religion and community in the new urban America
Religion and Community in the New Urban America Religion and Community in the New Urban America z PAUL D. NUMRICH AND ELFRIEDE WEDAM 1 3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 © Oxford University Press 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–0–19–938684–0 (hbk.); 978–0–19–938685–7 (pbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper From both authors: In memory of the late Director of the Religion in Urban America Program, Lowell W. Livezey (1943–2007), to whom we owe so much. From Numrich: For Christine, who has explored some of the world’s great cities with me. From Wedam: For my immigrant parents, whose urban experiences shaped the next generation. Contents Foreword by Martin D. Stringer ix Preface and Acknowledgments xi Introduction: The New Urban Era and the Religion Factor 1 PART I: Theoretical and Conceptual Framework 1. Adding Religion to Chicago’s Story 17 2. Community and Congregations in the New Metropolis 35 PART II: Congregational Case Studies 3. Neighborhood Parishes and Churches in a Restructuring City 61 4. Area Mosques and Diverse Corridors 104 5. Area Congregations in the City 139 6. Area Congregations in a Suburban Boom Town 177 7. Metro Congregations: A Wider View of the Restructuring Metropolis 217 viii Contents PART III: Religion’s Urban Significance: Chicago and Beyond 8. Congregations and Change: Interpreting Religion’s Significance in the New Metropolis 255 Afterword: A Case for Representativeness 283 Appendix A: Research Methods 289 Appendix B: Questionnaire 293 Appendix C: Field Notes on Worship Services 295 Appendix D: Protocol for In-Depth Study of Religious Congregations 299 Notes 307 Bibliography 311 Index 341 Foreword ChiCago has been the primary focus for the study of the city for just short of a hundred years. Through that time many individuals and teams, from many different disciplines, have focused on the structures of the city, on the lives of its inhabitants, and on the way in which the people impact on the city and the city impacts on its people. From the very start Robert Park emphasized the need to focus both on the “ecology” of the city, its social and physical structures, and on the “moral order” of the urban community. For many in sociology, history, urban studies, and urban planning, the first of these has predominated over the second. In focusing, once again, on Chicago, and in this case taking into account the wider metropolis, Elfriede Wedam and Paul Numrich have attempted to redress the balance. They explore the relationship between religion and the city, both historically in the academic literature, and more significantly on the ground in various neighborhoods, suburbs, and intersections within the metropolis. This book has grown out of the work of the Religion in Urban America Program that was established by Lowell Livezey in Chicago in the early 1990s. I have been privileged and honored to play a very small part in the development of that project and to provide an international comparator in my own work in the British city of Birmingham. Over those twenty years we have witnessed a paradigm shift in the study of the city, and in the study of religion. In urban studies the focus has moved to the “global city,” “transnationalism,” “globalization” in one direction, and to the rec- ognition of diversity, multiculturalism and, more recently, superdiversity in the other. In terms of religion, academic concerns have moved away from a focus on the world religions, secularization, and on Europe and the United States to more emphasis on everyday, or lived, religion, reli- gious diversity, and the interaction between the secular and the religious. In this text we see both these paradigm shifts in action as Wedam and Numrich draw on an extensive range of theory, in both urban studies
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