Spirit in the Cities : Searching for Soul in the Urban Landscape

In recent decades economic dislocation, immigration, new architecture, and other forces have transformed the physical, social, and even religious landscape of large cities. There gleaming skyscrapers tower over struggling ghettos, abandoned businesses mar upscale shopping areas, and tall-steeple churches sometimes languish where storefront mosques thrive.

Exploring the religious significance of this new urban landscape, a group of theologians, members of the Workgroup on Constructive Christian Theology, traveled to select cities and found an exciting, vibrant, and multivoiced religious spirit at work. In these essays five leading American theologians delve deeply into the contemporary spiritual geographies of five cities, capturing, through a mix of personal and historical narrative, political analysis, and theological rumination, a sense of this new sacred space and the spirit aborning there.

Sheila Briggs is an Associate Professor in the School of Religion at the University of Southern California. Among her current interests are slavery in early Christianity and religious and moral themes in cult television. She is co-editing a forthcoming handbook on feminists theology from Oxford University Press.

M. Shawn Copeland is professor emerita of systematic theology at Boston College. She has been president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. She has taught at Marquette University, Yale University Divinity School, and the Institute for Black Catholic Studies, Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans.

Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz was born and raised in La Habana, Cuba, and was Professor of Christian Ethics and Theology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and author of En la Lucha: Elaborating a Mujerista Theology (revised edition, Fortress Press 2004) and La Lucha Continues-Mujerista Theology (2004).

Linda Mercadante is B. Robert Straker Professor of Theology at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio. She holds her doctorate from Princeton Theological Seminary and is the author of Victims & Sinners: Spiritual Roots of Addiction and Recovery (1996) and Gender, Doctrine, and God: The Shakers and Contemporary Theology (1990).

Mark Lewis Taylor is the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Theology and Culture at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is author of The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America (Fortress Press, 2001) and Remembering Esperanza: A Cultural-Political Theology for North American Praxis. He is also editor of Paul Tillich: Theologian of the Boundaries (Fortress Press, 1991) and co-editor of Reconstructing Christian Theology (Fortress Press, 1994).