Spirituality and Social Change: Rebuilding the Human City

Philip F. Sheldrake

Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality, Volume 9, Number

2, Fall 2009, pp. 137-156 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/scs.0.0069

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/scs/summary/v009/9.2.sheldrake.html

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ESSAYS

Spirituality and Social Change:

Rebuilding the Human City
Philip F. Sheldrake

J ust before the United States Presidential election in November 2008, I

passed Old South Church in downtown Boston and on its wayside pulpit saw 137
the following quotation from Fr. Theodore Hesbergh: “Voting is a civil sacra-
ment.”1 What an interesting phrase—the public realm is sacred and social life
is a kind of spiritual practice. In practical terms, what does “public” imply?
Some social commentators such as José Casanova limit public life to the po-
litical sphere.2 Others, like Lyn Lofland define “public” more broadly as the
contexts where we interact with strangers.3 The public arena is where diverse
people attempt to establish a common life. To live publicly implies learning
how to be truly hospitable to what is different and unfamiliar. For Lyn Lofland
the human city is the paradigm of public existence. Following that idea, I want
to suggest that the meaning and future of human cities is one of the most criti-
cal spiritual, not simply social, economic or planning issues of our time.
The reflections that follow are those of a Christian theologian. In that
sense, my approach to what a city means and what it might be is particular.
However, my thinking over the last few years has been greatly expanded by
contact with a network of urban theorists, architects and planners, policy-
shapers, and others concerned about the future of cities. I was privileged to
bring nearly thirty of these together for a colloquium in Durham two years
ago on the theme of spirituality and cities. These conversations have enabled
me to begin to develop a way of reflecting about cities that connects theology
and spirituality with urban theory and architecture. This mixture of languages
underpins this essay.
The language of “spirituality” is also beginning to play a part in the think-
ing of urban professionals whether they are overtly religious or self-described
secular humanists such as Leonie Sandercock. She writes explicitly for fellow
urban planners of the need for the language of “spirituality” and “narratives
of redemption.”4 As scholars of Christian spirituality we need to join this criti-
cal conversation and contribute from the riches of our tradition a developed
vocabulary of “the spiritual” as well as the extensive Christian experience of
seeking to create human communities.

Sheldrake | Spirituality and

Spiritus Social
9 (2009): Change:
137–156 © 2009Rebuilding the Human
by The Johns Hopkins City
University Press
 The City as Spiritual Challenge
The world is rapidly becoming urbanized. At a basic level, our environments
shape the human spirit. Conversely, our understanding of what enhances the
human spirit shapes the environments we build. As we confront urban futures
in the twenty-first century, one key question is “what are cities for?” They no
longer have strictly practical roles as a defense against attack or as the neces-
sary focus for economic systems. If cities are to have a meaning rather than
merely an irreversible existence, there needs to be greater reflection on their
civilizing possibilities. Cities have a capacity to focus a range of physical, intel-
lectual, and creative energies simply because they combine differences of age,
138 ethnicity, culture, gender, and religion in unparalleled ways.
In the Western world from Plato and Aristotle onwards, cities have always
been powerful symbols of how we understand and construct human com-
munity. In particular, cities are paradigms of our outer, public life. Unfortu-
nately, since the nineteenth century, particularly in the United Kingdom and
United States, the private sphere (inwardness, family and friends, home) has
been idealised as the backstage where individuals are truly themselves, relax-
ing unobserved before playing different roles on the public stage.5 However,
from a Christian perspective is public living simply a role? Theology, following
Augustine, affirms that there is no absolutely private identity. To be human
embodies a common life and a common task. Without developing a complex
point further, it is important to note the intimate link between human identity
and a Trinitarian theology of God. The core of the Christian life is to be united
with God in Jesus Christ through a Spirit-led communion with one another.
God’s own relational nature is fundamental to this life. God may be said to be
“persons-in-communion,” a mutuality of self-giving love. Thus, communion
underpins existence itself.6
What of Christian spirituality? For many people the word unfortunately
implies a quest for personal spiritual experience or for individual self-realisa-
tion. Yet, the present Archbishop of Canterbury, the theologian Rowan Wil-
liams, notes that “we are systematically misled, even corrupted, by a picture
of the human agent as divided into an outside and an inside—a “true self,”
hidden, buried, to be excavated by one or another kind of therapy.”7 Rather,
our identity comes into being from the start through human communication
and interaction. An unbalanced rhetoric of interiority (often associated with an
autonomous view of human identity) has had serious moral consequences be-
cause it suggests that our outer life, and therefore our social life, is of second-
ary importance.
The prioritizing of interiority within Christianity has often been blamed on
St Augustine. However, Augustine and other early Christian spiritual teachers
understood interiority differently from modern approaches. Augustine adopted

SPIRITUS | 9.2
the symbol of the heart as an expression of the self. Thus, in Book 10 of his
Confessions, he refers to “my heart, where I am whatever it is that I am.”8 For
Augustine, God created humans with the divine image, the imago Dei in their
heart. In his Tractates on the Gospel of John, Augustine invites us to reconnect
with this real self: “Return to your heart! See there what perhaps you perceive
about God because the image of God is there” (18.10). By leaving the heart,
Augustine implies an experience of fragmentation because “the heart” stands
for the whole self which offers coherence and is where we also encounter
everything in God. This is not evidence of a privatized spirituality but must be
read alongside Augustine’s doctrine of creation. In his Commentary on Gen-
esis, Adam’s sin was precisely to please himself and to live for himself (secun- 139
dum se vivere, sibi placere). The most insidious sin is withdrawing into privacy,
self-enclosure and self-seeking pride (De Gen ad litt XI.15.19–20).9
Interestingly, Evelyn Underhill suggests in her classic book, Mysticism, that
a defining characteristic of Christian spirituality and mysticism is that union
with God impels a person towards an active, rather than purely passive and
inward life.10 Her favorite example is the fourteenth-century Flemish priest
John Ruusbroec. He conceived the contemplative life as something that joined
created beings to each other in mutual service. “A person who has been sent
down by God from these heights [contemplation] is full of truth and rich in all
the virtues. . . . He will therefore always flow forth to all who need him, for
the living spring of the Holy Spirit is so rich that it can never be drained dry.
. . . He therefore leads a common life, for he is equally ready for contempla-
tion or for action and is perfect in both.”11 Ruusbroec adds that people who
practiced the attainment of inwardness and disregarded charity were guilty of
spiritual wickedness.12
A number of recent writers also suggest that contemplative spirituality is
vital to the public realm. The Spanish theologian Gaspar Martinez notes that
modern Catholic theologies engaged with public or political life also focus
sharply on spirituality. He cites in particular Johannes Baptist Metz, Gustavo
Gutierrez, and David Tracy—inspired in different ways by the Jesuit Karl
Rahner.13 Rahner himself defined prayer fundamentally in terms of relationship
rather than merely as practices and went on to say that: “All positive religious
acts which are directly and explicitly related, both knowingly and willingly,
to God may be called prayer.”14 So, it is possible to think of our committed
Christian lives as prayer and formal moments of meditation or common liturgy
as explicit articulations of our larger business of living for God.
Specifically, what of the connections between spirituality and social
change? The Jesuit Robert Egan suggests that in Christian terms all inner
transformation is ultimately for the sake of transformative action in society.15
Conversely, the Chilean theologian Segundo Galilea has written powerfully

Sheldrake | Spirituality and Social Change: Rebuilding the Human City

 concerning the necessity of a contemplative dimension to our responses to in-
justice. Galilea questions whether such responses are ultimately effective if they
are purely political and social. Humans are not able to be truly compassion-
ate, or genuinely to transform oppressive structures without becoming part of
Jesus’ own compassion. In a context of social change, therefore, Galilea argues
that contemplative practice enables the inner conversion needed for lasting
liberation and solidarity.16 Finally, to return to the question of cities, by becom-
ing more engaged with the question, approaches to Christian spirituality may
extend their attention beyond classic texts and spiritual practices to focus more
deeply on the practices of everyday life and on material culture.
140 Cities represent and create a climate of values that define how we under-
stand ourselves and gather together. In his recent brilliant study, The City: A
Global History, Joel Kotkin notes that throughout history, successful cities
have performed three critical functions—the provision of security, the hosting
of commerce, and the creation of sacred space.17 Historically this has been ex-
pressed by religious buildings, cathedrals, temples, and mosques that embod-
ied a transcendent horizon in and for the city. The point is that the city is, or
should be, a sacred place, expressive of a vision of human existence.
The contemporary growth rate of cities offers a critical challenge. The fig-
ures over the last fifty years or so are illuminating. In 1950, 29% of the world’s
population lived in urban environments. By 1965 this had risen to 36%, by
1990 to 50%. This is likely to rise to somewhere between 60% and 75% by
2025.18 At the dawn of the 21st century, humanity for the first time faces a
mega-urbanized world. Most humans live in cities; we are dealing increas-
ingly with megacities; and cities are increasingly globalized in terms of their
footprints. Most megacities are in the so-called developing world (Mexico City
18+ million, Mumbai 18 million, Sao Paolo 17+ million, Shanghai 14+ million,
Soeul 13 million). As Eduardo Mendieta, a leading US urban commentator
suggests, this means in effect that the mega-urbanization of the world is often
simultaneously “slumization.” One in six city-dwellers world-wide is currently
a slum dweller and at the current rate of increase, by 2050 one in three people
on the planet—3 billion—will be.
Even in our Western culture, over the last fifty years or so, Western cities
have undermined place identity in pursuit of values driven largely by economic
considerations. In an increasingly placeless culture we become “standardized,
removable, replaceable, easily transported and transferred from one location
to another.”19 The French anthropologist Marc Augé, student of the Jesuit
Michel de Certeau, distinguishes between place, full of historical monuments
and creative of social life, and non-place (“curious places which are both
everywhere and nowhere”) where no organic social life is possible. By this he
means such contexts as supermarkets, airports, hotels, freeways, in front of the

SPIRITUS | 9.2
 141

Jerusalem 2001. © Jeffrey Ladd

television, working at a computer. These experiences bring about a fragmenta-

tion of awareness that leads to incoherence in relation to “the world.” Unlike
non-place, true “place” has three essential characteristics—it engages with our
identity, with our relationships and with our history.20
By contrast, the monumental Modernist architecture and design that still
dominates many of today’s Western cities does not stand for the value of indi-
vidual people, for effective relationships, or for memory. Rather, it speaks the
language of size, money, and power. Commercial complexes such as Canary
Wharf tower in London’s Docklands exist in brooding isolation rather than
in relationship to anywhere else. Modern cities built or rebuilt in the last fifty
years frequently lack proper centers to express the life of a multifaceted com-
munity. Where does this tendency come from? Paradoxically, the process began
earlier with a Christian-inspired quest for more beautiful and healthier cities
to counter the industrialized cities inherited from the nineteenth century and
dominated by crowded slums and belching factories.21 The prophet was Dana
Webster Bartlett, a Congregational pastor, who had ministered in the tene-
ments of St. Louis and was a founder of the City Beautiful movement. He went
to work in Los Angeles at the beginning of the twentieth century and pro-
moted the movement of manufacturing away from city centers to the periphery
and the move of working class people from teeming tenements to single-family
homes with their gardens. Thus were born suburbia and urban sprawl. So,
by the 1930s Los Angeles demonstrated to the world a new urban vision—
dispersed, multi-centered, and largely suburbanized. The downside was the

Sheldrake | Spirituality and Social Change: Rebuilding the Human City

 absence of public parks or the great public areas of earlier cities and the loss of
compact community. In the long term, the City Beautiful movement, by ideal-
izing suburbs as a new kind of urban gospel, encouraged car ownership and
increased pollution.
The process was further exacerbated in Europe after World War 2 by a
cellular view of urban planning derived in part from the Swiss architect Le
Corbusier. This divided cities into special areas for living, working, leisure,
and shopping. The consequences were a fragmentation of human living, the
effect of emptying parts of cities at night, especially the centers, and finally the
separation of areas by distance and clear boundaries, substantially increasing
142 the need for travel and pollution. This “zoning” as it was called may also be
said to reflect a growing secularization of Western culture. There was no longer
a centered, at least not spiritually centered, meaning for the city. It was now a
commodity, fragmented into multiple activities and multiple ways of organiz-
ing time and space.22

A Christian Anti-Urban Rhetoric?

Western thinking about cities has been deeply influenced over the last thou-
sand years by Christian theology. Christianity has sometimes been accused of
anti-urban bias. Certainly the scriptures get off to a tricky start. The Book of
Genesis seems deeply gloomy about cities. Cain, symbol of human pride and
violence, is portrayed as the founder of Enoch the first city, an alternative to
God’s Eden (Genesis 4:16–17). Later people of Babel with their tower seek to
replace the authority of God (Genesis 11:1–9). The cities of Sodom and Go-
morrah are classic symbols of corruption. Yet, this is one-sided. There are oth-
er positive biblical images of the city in the Hebrew Scriptures. For example in
the Book of Psalms, God is enthroned in the sanctuary of Zion (Psalm 9), the
city becomes a living reminder of God’s power and faithfulness (Psalm 48), and
is described as the house of God (Psalm 122). The city is intended to express
the peace of God. Those who live in the city are required to share God’s peace
with one another (Psalm 122:6–9).23 Turning to the New Testament, Jerusalem
is the focal point and climax of Jesus’ mission. The cities of the Roman Empire
become the centre of Christian mission in the Book of Acts, particularly in the
strategy of the Apostle Paul. Christianity rapidly became an urban religion.24
Most striking of all, on the very last page of the New Testament (Revelation
21), a new holy city, perfectly harmonious and peaceful, is made the image of
the final establishment of God’s reign.
However, the eminent American social theorist Richard Sennett blames
Christian theology, in part, for the contemporary soulless nature of so many
cities, particularly its public spaces. Sennett argues that Western culture suffers
from a division between inner and outer life. “It is a divide between subjective

SPIRITUS | 9.2
experience and worldly experience, self and city.”25 This separation, accord-
ing to Sennett, is based on an unacknowledged fear of self-exposure, viewed
as a threat rather than life-enhancing. Sennett suggests that, apart from spaces
for consumer needs, city design has increasingly concentrated on creating safe
divisions between different groups of people. Public space thus becomes bland,
as the main purpose is to facilitate movement across it rather than encounters
within it.26 For the city to recover, Sennett suggests, we need to reaffirm the
inherent value of the outer embodied life.
Sennett interprets Christianity unequivocally as a religion of pilgrimage
and dislocation rather than placement. For Sennett, St. Augustine’s classic,
City of God, is the foundational expression of the triumph of an inner spiritual 143
“world” restlessly searching for eternal fulfillment over the physical, everyday
city.27 Human social places are to be viewed with suspicion. What is most obvi-
ously characteristic of these places is difference and diversity. Sennett argues,
therefore, that by denying the value of the outside, Christianity has under-
pinned Western doubts about diversity. If the ultimate value of inner life finds
expression externally, it was in church buildings. Sennett equates “the sacred”
with sanctuary which implies an image of protection and refuge from a wider
world. Therefore, in his mind, church buildings effectively subvert a meaning-
ful definition for the city itself.28 In the pre-modern city, churches were “sanc-
tuaries” in both senses and so, according to Sennett, promoted withdrawal
from the outer life. Although overall I greatly respect Sennett’s writings, his
assertions both about Augustine and about what he calls the “Protestant ethic
of space” which reinforced a suspicion of public space and public life have
recently been critiqued and therefore require rethinking.29

Christian Urban Visions

It is true that Augustine states at the start of his City of God (Book 1 Preface)
that the earthly city is marked by a “lust for domination.” However this is
a critique of late-Imperial Rome, his urban paradigm, and also a prophetic
warning to those who wish to canonize a thousand year Reich or any political
system. Augustine was rightly suspicious of attempts by even Christian rul-
ers to suggest that their commonwealth was the perfect polity let alone God’s
Kingdom on earth.30
Yet, a consensus of Augustine scholars would agree that he does not deny
the status of the secular realm. We need to distinguish between the notion of
“profane” which gradually took on the negative connotations of whatever is
contrary to the sacred, and the “secular.” The “secular” has clear Christian
origins and simply implies the saeculum, this age, the here and now. We also
need to distinguish carefully between Augustine’s theological concept of the
“earthly city” (civitas terrena, realm of sin) and the social reality of the every-

Sheldrake | Spirituality and Social Change: Rebuilding the Human City

 day city. The human city is a neutral space where the spiritual reality of “the
city of God” and the counter-spiritual reality of “the earthly city” co-exist, like
the wheat and tares of the gospel parable, until the end of time. Augustine is
not indifferent to the moral foundations of the human city and did not deny a
legitimate place for the secular sphere within a Christian interpretation of the
world as the theater of God’s action.31
More broadly, Western Christianity embraced philosophically and archi-
tecturally a positive vision of the city as a spiritual reality. From 1050–1250
Europe underwent an urban revival, only matched during the nineteenth cen-
tury industrial revolution. This had a serious impact on social and religious
144 perspectives. One of the striking consequences of the new urbanism was the
development of the great cathedrals. Images of the sacred shifted from Genesis
to the Book of Revelation, from the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem.32
In the urban cathedral, paradise was symbolically evoked and also brought
down to earth at the heart of the city.33 To enter it was to be transported into a
transcendent realm by the spaces, floods of light through glass-filled walls and
increasingly elaborate liturgies. For Abbot Suger of St. Denis, often credited
with the formal birth of French Gothic, church buildings had to be more
impressive than all others in a city. The architecture of the cathedrals was in-
tended to be a microcosm of the cosmos, evoking a peaceable oneness between
Creator and creation. This was a utopian space where an idealised heavenly
harmony was anticipated proleptically in the here and now. But it was idea-
lised because the architectural portrayal of divine order inevitably reflected
social hierarchies.34
Yet, at best, the great urban churches promoted more than a two-dimen-
sional, static, urban “map.” They were repositories for the cumulative memory
and constantly renewed aspirations of the city community where people engage
with decades or even centuries of human pain, achievements, hopes, and ideals.
These “memory palaces” are a constant reminder that the act of remembering
is itself vital to a healthy sense of identity. The American philosopher Arnold
Berleant suggests that the great cathedrals act as guides to an “urban ecology”
that contrasts with the monotony of the modern city “thus helping transform
it from a place where one’s humanity is constantly threatened into a place
where it is continually achieved and enlarged.”35 Such an urban icon speaks
of the “condition of the world” and offers communion with something deeper
than merely a well-ordered city.
However, in Christian images of the city, “the sacred” was not restricted
to churches. There was a clear sense that the streets themselves embraced a
wider sacred landscape. In predominantly Catholic countries, street corners
frequently retain religious plaques and statues. For example, the rich collection
of street shrines in the città vecchia of Bari, ranging from the twelfth century

SPIRITUS | 9.2
to the present, has been the subject of extensive scholarly research.36 The sense
that the city as a whole was a sacred landscape was reinforced by processions
and blessings. In medieval cities Christian ritual was a public drama, not only
in the many churches, but also in feast-day pageants, mystery plays and street
processions (the remote ancestors of carnivals).
Other voices promoted the ideal that city life, with citizens living in con-
cord, could be as much a way to God as monastic life. The political writings of
the thirteenth century theologian Thomas Aquinas described a city as the most
complete of human communities. The study of cities is “politics” whose aim
according to Aquinas is to be a practical philosophy for procuring goodness in
human affairs through the use of reason.37 For Aquinas, cities and politics were 145
important because he understood community as vital to human flourishing. He
offered a Christian reading of Aristotle’s sense that to create the polis was a
fundamental human vocation. To be human is to be political but to be politi-
cal is to learn how to actualize one’s humanity. Aquinas even borrowed from
Aristotle plans for constructing cities aimed at making the good life realizable.
Based on Aristotle’s notion of cities as creative of the virtues, Aquinas noted
that cities ultimately continue for the sake of “the good life”—that is, the
properly human goals of courage, temperance, liberality, greatness of soul, and
companionable modesty.38
On a more popular level, a genre of poetry, the laudes civitatis, articulated
a spiritual ideal of civic life. These poems depict the human city as a place
where, like the Heavenly City, diverse people live together in peace. The poems
further portrayed cities as renowned for the quality of communal life in which
every citizen had a unique role in building up the whole. The city itself was
idealized as sacred with a number of spiritual qualities. Thus a Milanese hymn
praised the inhabitants because they fulfilled all the requirements of Matthew
25—that the hungry would be fed, strangers welcomed, the naked, clothed,
and so on.39 Christian cities also sometimes made the heavenly Jerusalem of
Revelation 21 a model for urban planning. For example, the 1339 Statutes of
Florence emphasized the existence of the sacred number of twelve gates even
though the city had by then extended to fifteen gates.40

Michel de Certeau, Le Corbusier and the Modern City

In reflecting on more recent urban realities from a Christian perspective, it is
instructive to compare the thinking of the architect Le Corbusier with that of
the French Jesuit social scientist, cultural theorist and historian of Christian
spirituality, Michel de Certeau (died 1986).41 In his famous essay for architects,
“Ghosts in the City,” it is clear that one of de Certeau’s targets was Le Corbus-
ier, one of the greatest figures of twentieth century architecture and urban plan-

Sheldrake | Spirituality and Social Change: Rebuilding the Human City

 ning. As an architect, Le Corbusier undoubtedly created outstanding individual
buildings in the Modernist style. However, as an urban planner Le Corbusier
stood for Modernist approaches that de Certeau abhorred: a tendency to erase
the past and to subordinate people’s lives to abstract and elitist concepts of
“space.” Interestingly, Le Corbusier was influenced by aspects of Christian
symbolism and by the writings of the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin42 but
fundamentally believed in a kind of mystical utopianism based on Platonism
and a kind of Gnostic matter-spirit dualism rather than Christianity.43
For Le Corbusier, true knowledge and value were found in the inner, indi-
vidual life. Consequently, his city schemes made it difficult for people to gather
146 together casually because uncontrolled socializing was a distraction. His city
theory sought to eliminate anything that reinforced public life as a determining
factor in human identity. Not surprisingly, Le Corbusier disliked participatory
politics. Totalitarianism offered efficient bureaucracy without wasting time on
political debate.44
Le Corbusier espoused the “radiant city,” with glass towers reaching to the
sky offering a transcendent horizon with the city itself as the Temple. Conse-
quently, Le Corbusier’s city plans had no churches. In this spirit, Le Corbusier
called the skyscrapers of Manhattan “new white cathedrals.” They engineered
a kind of euphoria and not only embodied transcendence in their sublime
height but offered a “total vision” symbolised by panoramic vistas.
In contrast, de Certeau was concerned that Modernist urban “restora-
tion,” which generated upmarket apartments and shopping precincts, also dis-
placed existing communities and forced them to disperse to outer areas where
the 1960s low cost housing projects of Paris created islands of alienation still
inhabited by new waves of immigrants and still problematic. De Certeau had
a person-centred rather than theory-centred view of cities. For him, a city is
a richly textured fabric woven by its users and their “ways of proceeding” (a
phrase de Certeau borrowed from Jesuit spirituality), their chance encounters,
the stories they tell each other, the dreams they share. De Certeau’s viewpoint
was partly political but there was also a spiritual underpinning to his pleading
with architects.45 His defence of provisionality and objection to utopian visions
reflects an implicitly Augustinian theology (inherited from his great mentor,
Henri de Lubac) that a harmonious arrangement of human environments im-
plies more than rational order.
In another essay, “Walking in the City,”46 de Certeau expressed a favourite
theme, resistance to systems that control us and leave no room for otherness.
Standing on top of the World Trade Center, de Certeau writes of the tempta-
tion of “seeing the whole,” of looking down upon the city and totalising it.
Lifted out of Manhattan’s grasp, we become (or became) simply voyeurs, read-
ing the city as if it were a simple text. But this is an illusion.47 De Certeau com-

SPIRITUS | 9.2
pares this way of seeing to the aloofness of the urban planner. For him, what
he calls the “concept-city” of Modernism was dying. What outlives it are the
people who walk below, “the microbe-like, singular and plural practices which
an urbanistic system was supposed to control or suppress.”48 These everyday
practices are what make a city lived space. That is why de Certeau believed the
role of indeterminacy was so important. “Thus to eliminate the unforeseen as
an illegitimate accident and an obstacle to rationality is to forbid the possibil-
ity of a living practice of the city.”49
Michel de Certeau rejected the urban utopias of planners like Le Corbusier
partly because they reduced “transcendence” to abstractions about “space”
and “light,” but most of all because they overestimated the possibility of a 147
kind of secularised salvation realised through social engineering, urban design,
and regulated planning.

Spirituality in the City: Spatial Structures

It is now possible to think briefly about some elements of spirituality related to
the rebuilding of the city both physically and socially. Some twenty years ago
Faith in the City, a controversial and influential report on the state of Britain’s
cities, was produced by the Church of England. Interestingly, about eighteen
months ago, a new Commission on Urban Life & Faith, with an ecumenical
membership, including a Catholic bishop, published a further report, Faith-
ful Cities. Reflecting a theme that also preoccupies urban theorists, architects,
and policy makers, throughout the report runs the question, what makes a
good city? Words used include “active,” “diverse,” and “inclusive,” “safe,”
“well-led,” “environmentally sensitive,” with an “active civil society,” “values
the inhabitants,” and with “opportunities for all,” “attracts wealth creators,”
but also “shares its wealth,” big enough to be viable but small enough to be
on a human scale. In a sentence, it is where people without exceptions do not
merely exist but truly belong. The good city enables human aspirations to be
productive rather than repressed or limited to self-indulgence. Fundamentally,
the “good city” is person-centered and inclusive. Although the report opens
up interesting areas some people feel that it has two limitations. First, it says
relatively little about the built urban environment (urbs) compared to civic life
(civitas). Second, its theological-spiritual themes are less critical-prophetic than
they might be.
Many of us may not be used to thinking about spirituality in relation to
spatial structures. So, first, I want to mention briefly two of several ways that
buildings and spaces shape a spiritual vision. The spiritual or sacred encapsu-
lates a vision of ultimate value in human existence—an “interpreted world,”
if you like. This moves city design and building beyond a purely utilitarian
understanding of human needs. We need city buildings and spaces that, like the

Sheldrake | Spirituality and Social Change: Rebuilding the Human City

 great city churches of previous centuries speak to us of “the condition of the
world.”
One design question concerns awe. This may refer to a sense of God or a
more diffuse sense of transcendence. It is important to reflect on what makes
buildings or spaces “awesome” in a constructive sense. This surely implies
more than sheer amazement at design innovation or the unavoidable presence
of a building that materially dominates my local skyline. It also reflects motive
and purpose. I suggest that genuine reverence and awe are more likely in rela-
tion to built spaces that consciously reinforce the value of people at large and
shared public life rather than merely project the profiles of economic or social
148 elites. In this context it is interesting to reflect on contemporary debates about
what is implied by the contemporary genre of “iconic buildings.” These have
replaced the symbolic monuments of yesteryear, landmarks that had a power
to persuade, or that enshrined permanent reminders of the fundamental values
of a society.50
People’s reactions to iconic buildings are ambivalent. On the positive side,
thoughtful architects suggest that, apart from being impressively designed and
highly visible, iconic structures should once again act as collective symbols that
animate and articulate the very nature of a city. Two prominent architectural
thinkers have interesting comments to make. Laurie Peake suggests that the
authentic iconic structure has a kind of material spirituality in that it embodies
a kind of ascetic self-denial. “This may be seen as their principle role, a selfless
denial of their own significance for the betterment of their context.” 51 They
are a “symbol of aspiration, rising above the dreary mediocrity of buildings
measured by profit margins and speed of construction” and they function as
a landmark, “giving us security on the horizon in a fast-moving world.”52
Charles Jencks even suggests that an iconic building, like religious icons, al-
ways has “a trace of sanctity about it, the aura of a saint. By definition it is an
object to be worshipped, however fitfully.”53
However, serious questions remain. Is the purpose of iconic buildings, par-
ticularly if they are not public spaces, merely to shock and awe people in ways
that suggest a fundamentally contemptuous culture? In the midst of our cur-
rent financial crisis this has a particularly sharp edge when what are described
as modern icons are often commercial buildings or investment banks (for
example, Norman Foster’s prize-winning Swiss Re building for Credit Suisse
in the City of London). As Jencks sharply asks, if religion or other meta-nar-
ratives are no longer central to the life of a commercial city, are we left simply
with money, size, and power as the new “universals” to be worshipped?
A second spatial element in shaping a spiritual city is the question of
how we design urban centers and public spaces. A number of European cities
infected by the Modernist sterility of public space constructed in the 1960s

SPIRITUS | 9.2
and 1970s are regenerating their centers precisely as spaces that more effec-
tively symbolize a city’s consciousness and aspirations. The eminent British
architect and influential advisor to a number of governments, Richard Rog-
ers, has been a notable proponent of humane urban designs. This is especially
evident in his promotion of what he calls “open-minded space.”54 This has
spiritual resonances. Fundamentally such space (for example the plaza or
public square) is person-centered. Its function is left open rather than prede-
termined by architects, planners or politicians. It does not prioritize efficiency
but human participation. Consequently, it is accessible physically, intellectu-
ally, and spiritually. Its very design should evoke inclusivity and encourage
diversity. Such space enables creativity, celebration and play versus constraint. 149
Like de Certeau, Rogers believes in indeterminacy, an ability to transcend static
order. Rogers grew up in Florence and values the purposeful Italian custom of
passeggiata—casual “wandering about in public” that leaves room for surprise
and celebrates people’s social persona. Open-minded space reinforces public
existence against a tendency to segregate different groups in protected enclaves
and gated communities. The public square offers a physical center, a spiritual
centering, to a city and its inhabitants.
An important part of effective public space is the value given to memory
and history. The Jesuit de Certeau had defended the value of history against
the tendency of earlier models of city regeneration to erase the past. For de
Certeau, this undermined the power of narrative to enable people to use the
city as a place for creative living. Human stories take ownership of spaces, cre-
ate bridges between people, are a key element in a tactics of resistance whereby
city people transgress strategies of control set by politicians or planners. Thus,
leaving space for history is vital in maintaining a city as a community. As the
French philosopher Paul Ricoeur reminds us too, remembering is itself vital
to a healthy sense of identity. A loss of memory condemns culture to discon-
tinuity. Banishing historical associations undermines key elements of human
solidarity (we bond by sharing stories) and removes the incentive for chang-
ing the status quo as well as a means of bringing it about. In Ricoeur’s words,
“We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being
narrated. The whole history of suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for
narrative.”55

Spirituality in the City: Urban Virtues

Clearly, an urban spirituality should also express the interaction of people.
Spirituality is not merely concerned with devotional practices but involves our
overall “conduct of life.” This includes the notion of virtue. So, my question
is: what are urban virtues for the early 21st century city? Eduardo Mendieta
whom I mentioned earlier has written about frugality.56 Charles Leadbeater

Sheldrake | Spirituality and Social Change: Rebuilding the Human City

Piazza Del Campo seen from Torre del Mangia. Siena, Tuscany, Italy. © QT Luong | ter-
ragalleria.com
of the British social think tank Demos promotes renunciation and restraint
related to the need for a renewed sense of mutuality in response to the domi-
nant reality of diversity in contemporary cities.57 Mutuality demands that we
give up the absolute claims of individual choice in favor of civic cohesion. As
Leadbeater admits, in a consumer culture this is a counter-intuitive view.
Overall our spiritual visions for the city need to be robust enough to con-
front the dark side of life. Spirituality needs to offer us a language to confront
structural evils such as power dominance, violence, injustice, and social exclu-
sion. Spirituality involves a vision about how our human existence is intended
to be and in what ways it needs to be transformed. To put it in more theologi-
cal language, spirituality must include a narrative of “redemption”—the hope 151
we are called to affirm and the process of change. In this sense, a robust Chris-
tian spirituality “interrupts” or disrupts the everyday city—effectively acting
as a civic critique built on spiritual values—hence that notion at the start that
voting might be a civil sacrament.
Consequently, I want to suggest briefly another critical urban virtue which
derives quite explicitly from our Christian tradition—reconciliation and its
partner solidarity. The leading South African theologian John de Gruchy sug-
gests that the doctrine of reconciliation is “the inspiration and focus of all doc-
trines of the Christian faith.”58 There are specifically Christian characteristics
to reconciliation—it is not simply a socio-political word with some incidental
theological-spiritual gloss. Protestantism has tended to emphasize reconcilia-
tion between God and humanity as a result of the Cross (Romans 5:6–11) and
Catholicism has tended to emphasize how the love of God poured out upon us
as a result of the divine-human reconciliation creates a new humanity in which
the walls of division between people are broken down (2 Corinthians 5:17–20
and 6:1). In practice, both dimensions need to be held in tension.
The Church report on cities mentioned earlier, Faithful Cities, suggests
that we need to go beyond the liberal catchword, tolerance, when confronting
conflict and otherness in the city. Tolerance is passive and implies the magna-
nimity of powerful insiders towards those less favored. It also promotes a safe
parallelism where we allow the other to exist but definite boundaries remain
between people. We are not really asked to change. Faithful Cities offers as a
rich alternative to tolerance the biblical understanding of “hospitality” and re-
fers specifically to chapter 53 of the monastic Rule of St. Benedict on receiving
guests (explicitly defined as strangers rather than kin) as if they were Christ.
Hospitality implies a real relationship with those who are “other” or unlike
ourselves. However, the slight weakness of “hospitality” on its own is that it
may be taken to suggest something we merely offer to visiting guests to our
private home territory.

Sheldrake | Spirituality and Social Change: Rebuilding the Human City

 Reconciliation is a tougher word in which the walls of division are pulled
down and a new humanity is created. Its related notion of “solidarity” implies
a disinterested giving of ourselves to the other, taking up their cause, simply
for the sake of the other and accepting that to be in true solidarity, to be truly
reconciled actually implies loss. Those of us whose “more” is at the expense
of other’s “less” have to accept readjustment. Interestingly, the Oxford Eng-
lish Dictionary also defines reconciliation as “the reconsecration of desecrated
places.” We may think of those people who are excluded and disempowered
in our cities are “desecrated” because their status as unique images of God is
effectively denied.
152 Reconciliation and solidarity are rich and complex themes. They are para-
doxical in two ways. First, they suggest a common life based on a challenging
shared quest for the common good, a shared vision of the good life in a good
city. Yet, being in common, being in communion we might say, does not in
Christian terms imply the simple absorption of what is other into myself. The
theological underpinning for this is the classic Christian understanding of God
as Trinity in whose image we are all created and, according to the ancient East-
ern Christian tradition of theosis, deification, into whose very life we (with all
creation) are collectively being drawn. The ultimately mysterious life of God-
as-Trinity is imaged precisely as a communion (a koinonia) of mutually co-
inherent relationships in which the unique personhood of each is not absorbed
but eternally confirmed. Second, while the language of reconciliation implies
a human task it is ultimately beyond our capacity to achieve. To return to St.

Train Station, Pragues. © Gregory Popovitch

SPIRITUS | 9.2
Paul’s letters, reconciliation is the work of God. I said earlier that Christian
spirituality is not simply about spiritual practices or about individual self-real-
ization. It embodies a narrative of redemption—transformation, development,
change—certainly. However, while it is a process of healing from brokenness
to which we must open ourselves and commit ourselves, it is a process always
initiated by God and concluded by God.
The Letter to the Ephesians also relates reconciliation to participation in
the life of the Christian community. This becomes the carrier of the vision of
a new humanity in which Jew and Gentile are reconciled as members of one
body. As Christians we classically enact our theology and spirituality of com-
munity in celebrations of the Eucharist. The report Faithful Cities touches on 153
this in a brief but pregnant paragraph. The trouble is that some versions of a
theology and spirituality of the Eucharist concentrate on building up the com-
munity of the Church in and for itself. In this case, the Eucharist ends up as the
celebration of the spiritual equivalent of the well secured “gated communities”
we increasingly find in upscale areas of large mixed cities such as London and
Paris or nowadays New Delhi.
However, this dilutes the spirituality implied by the risk of celebrating
Eucharist. To live eucharistically commits us to cross the boundaries of fear
and prejudice in an embrace of strangers in the public square in whom we are
challenged to recognize the Real Presence of God. I cannot help but recall the
courage of a Scottish Presbyterian minister in a housing estate near Glasgow,
later joined by a Catholic priest, who confronted local hatreds by throwing
open his church day and night even during services as a safe space for Muslim
refugees after one of them had been assaulted and murdered. “Reconciled in
the Eucharist, the members of the body of Christ are called to be servants of
reconciliation among men and women and witnesses of the joy of resurrection.
As Jesus went out to publicans and sinners and had table-fellowship with them
during his earthly ministry, so Christians are called in the Eucharist to be in
solidarity with the outcast and to become signs of the love of Christ who lived
and sacrificed himself for all and now gives himself in the Eucharist.”59
The redemptive narrative of the Eucharist tells a different story from the
one shaped by human divisions. There is therefore an uncomfortable tension
between this sacrament of reconciliation and efforts by Christians to resist hu-
man solidarity in the city. At the heart of a spirituality shaped by the Eucharist
is the belief that human identities are determined by God rather than by our
presuppositions. To paraphrase Rowan Williams, in a sacramental view of
human existence, performed especially in the Eucharist, we are bound into
solidarity with those whose presence we have not chosen.
This brings me at the conclusion of this essay back to Kotkin’s remark
that successful cities embodied a sense of sacred place. At the end of his final

Sheldrake | Spirituality and Social Change: Rebuilding the Human City

 chapter, “The Urban Future,” Kotkin notes that all major religions have pro-
duced models of urban meaning. However, he also notes that the sacred role of
cities is regularly ignored in contemporary discussions of the urban condition.
The “new urbanism” that seeks to respond to the global urban problematic
addresses sustainability and recovering a sense of history and identity but
rarely refers to the need for a shared moral or spiritual vision with the power
to hold cities together. Yet, more important that new buildings or public spaces
in isolation is the value people place on urban experience. A successful city is,
in the end, a state of mind that offers a vision of renewed humanity—capable
of co-existing with strangers and expressive of a shared code of social behav-
154 ior. Kotkin critiques all religions for losing touch with their urban visions and
therefore failing to contribute them to the critical contemporary conversation
about the future of cities. A “sense of the sacred” has been to a great extent
dispersed into awesome buildings or evocative cultural structures but without
the challenging yet supportive hint of divine guidance and spiritual possibility.
However, as Kotkin comments, the lesson of history is that without some kind
of “widely shared belief system it would be exceedingly difficult to envision a
viable urban future.”60

notes
1. This essay is an edited version of the 21st Joseph Lecture given at Boston College in Oc-
tober 2008 with material from the Jonathan Edwards Lecture given at Andover Newton
Theological School in April 2009.
2. José Casanova, Public Religion in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), 3.
3. See Lyn Lofland, The Public Realm: Exploring the City’s Quintessential Social Territory
(New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1998).
4. See L. Sandercock, “Spirituality & the Urban Professions: The Paradox at the Heart of
Planning” Planning Theory and Practice 7.1 (2006). See also her many references to
“cities of spirit” in Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities in the 21st Century (London: Con-
tinuum, 2003).
5. Casanova, Public Religion, 42.
6. See, for example, the work of the Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas, Being as Com-
munion (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), and a more detailed discus-
sion of the relationship between God-as-Trinity and human identity in Philip Sheldrake,
Spirituality and Theology: Christian Living and the Doctrine of God (London: Darton
Longman & Todd/New York: Orbis Books, 1998), especially 75–83.
7. See Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford/Malden Mass: Blackwell, 2000),
Chapter 16, “Interiority and Epiphany: A Reading in New Testament Ethics.”
8. Augustine, Confessions and Enchiridion, ed. Albert Outler (The Library of Christian
Classics, London: SCM Press, 1955) Book 10, Chapter 3, section 4.
9. On this point see R.A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1998), 78.
10. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness
(Oxford: One World Publications, 1993), 172. On this point see 172–74.

SPIRITUS | 9.2
11. John Ruusbroec, “The Sparkling Stone,” Conclusion, ET, John Ruusbroec: The Spiri-
tual Espousals and Other Works, ed. James Wiseman (New York: Paulist Press, 1985),
184.
12. Ruusbroec, The Spiritual Espousals, 136–43.
13. Gaspar Martinez, Confronting the Mystery of God: Political, Liberation and Public
Theologies (New York: Continuum, 2001).
14. Karl Rahner, “Prayer” in Encyclopedia of Theology (London: Burns & Oates, 1975),
1275.
15. Robert Egan; Foreword, Mysticism and Social Transformation, ed. Janet Ruffing (Syra-
cuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001); and “The Mystical and the Prophetic: Dimen-
sions of Christian Existence,” The Way Supplement 102 (Autumn 2001): 92–106.
16. Segundo Galilea, “The Spirituality of Liberation,” The Way (July 1985): 186–94.
17. Joel Kotkin, The City: A Global History (New York: Random House, 2006).
18. These figures are cited by Sir Crispin Tickell in his Introduction to Richard Rogers, Cit- 155
ies for A Small Planet (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), vii.
19. Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1992), 86–87.
20. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London/
New York: Verso, 1997), especially 51–2 & 77.
21. Kotkin, The City, Chapters 14 & 15.
22. For interesting remarks on the relationship between the fragmentation of intellectual
discourse, starting with the medieval separation of theology and spirituality, and the
contemporary secularisation of the city, see James Matthew Ashley, Interruptions:
Mysticism, Politics and Theology in the work of Johann Baptist Metz (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 10–12.
23. For a rather negative portrayal of Old Testament understandings of the city, see the
French Protestant writer Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City (Grand Rapids: Eerd-
mans, 1970). For a more positive reading, see Haddon Wilmer, “Images of the City
and the Shaping of Humanity” in A. Harvey, ed., Theology in the City (London: SPCK,
1989).
24. See, for example, Wayne Meeks, “St. Paul of the cities” in Peter S. Hawkins, ed., Reli-
gious Interpretations of the City (Atlanta: Scholars Press 1986), 15–23.
25. Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities (Lon-
don: Faber & Faber, 1993), xii.
26. Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye, xii–xiii.
27. Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye, 6–10.
28. Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye, 10–19.
29. On Augustine and Christian views of cities more generally, see P. Sheldrake “A Spiritual
City: Urban Vision and the Christian Tradition” in S. Bergmann, ed., Theology in Built
Environments: Exploring Religion, Architecture, and Design (Rutgers University NJ:
Transaction Books, 2009), 121–141. On Sennett’s critique of Protestantism, see H.
Stanworth, “Protestantism, Anxiety and Orientations to the Environment: Sweden as a
test case for the ideas of Richard Sennett,” in Worldviews: Environment, Culture and
Religion 10.3 (2006). 
30. Augustine’s commentary on Genesis is cited in R. Markus, The end of ancient Christian-
ity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 78..
31. For a recent study of the secular realm in Augustine, see R. A. Markus, Christianity and
the secular (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.).
32. See C. McDannell & B. Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1988), 70–80..
33. See P Sheldrake, “Reading Cathedrals as Spiritual Texts” Studies in Spirituality 11
(2001): 187–204.

Sheldrake | Spirituality and Social Change: Rebuilding the Human City

 34. B. Bedos-Rozak, “Form as social process” in V. Chieffo Raguin, K. Brush, and P.
Draper, eds., Artistic Integration in Gothic Buildings (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1995), 243–44.
35. See A. Berleant, The Aesthetics of Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1992), 62.
36. See N. Cortone & N. Lavermicocca, Santi di strada: Le edicole religiose della cittá vec-
chia di Bari, 5 volumes, (Bari: Edizione BA Graphis, 2001–2003).
37. Sententia Libri Politicorum. Opera Omnia, VIII, Paris 1891, Prologue A 69–70.
38. Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, Chapter II in R.W. Dyson, ed., Aquinas: Political
Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 8–10.
39. See P. Raedts, “The Medieval City as a Holy Place” in C. Caspers and M. Schneiders,
eds., Omnes Circumadstantes: Contributions Towards a History of the Role of the
People in the Liturgy (Kampen: Uitgeversmaatschappij J.H. Kok, 1990), 144–54.
156 40. See Chiara Frugoni, A Distant City: Images of Urban Experience in the Medieval World
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 27.
41. For Michel de Certeau’s thinking about cities, see “Walking in the City” and “Spatial
Stories” in The Practice of Everyday Life (ET Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988); Part 1: Living, especially “Ghosts in the city,” in The Practice of Everyday Life,
volume 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); “The Imaginary of the
City” and other isolated comments in Culture in the Plural (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001).
42. See F. Samuel, Le Corbusier: Architect and Feminist (Chichester: Wiley, 2004), 100.
43. For criticisms of the Cartesian “rhetoric of interiority” that imbued Le Corbusier, see W.
A. Davis, Inwardness and Existence (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
44. For a study of Le Corbusier’s theories of self see S. Richards, Le Corbusier and the
Concept of the Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
45. De Certeau, “Ghosts in the City.”
46. De Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 91–110.
47. De Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 92.
48. De Certeau, “Walking in the City,” 96.
49. De Certeau, “Indeterminate” in The Practice of Everyday Life, 203.
50. See for example, L. Peake, “Smashing Icons” in Will Alsop’s SuperCity (Manchester:
Urbis, 2005), 39–49; and C. Jencks, “The Iconic Building is Here to Stay” City 10.1
(April 2006): 3–20.
51. Peake, “Smashing Icons,” 41
52. Peake, “Smashing Icons,” 49.
53. Jencks, “The Iconic Building is Here to Stay,” 4.
54. Richard Rogers, Cities for a Small Planet (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 9–10.
55. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 1 (ET Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984), 75.
56. Eduardo Mendieta, “Invisible Cities: A Phenomenology of Globalisation from Below”
City 5.1 (2001): 7–25.
57. Charles Leadbeater, Civic Spirit: The Big Idea for a New Political Era (London: Demos,
1997), 30.
58. John de Gruchy, Reconciliation: Restoring Justice (London: SCM, 2002), 44.
59. Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, Faith and Order Paper 111, Geneva: World Council
of Churches 1982, para 24.
60. Kotkin, The City, 159.

SPIRITUS | 9.2