"We knew Koch, Guest, O'Hara, Ashbery, and Schuyler thrived on the gritty, buoyant clank of city life, but that they drew from a secret fountain there only the Brill Building really let on, until now. In seven crisply argued, essayistic chapters, Gray lets us see and feel the invisible paradise glowing within the visible form of the subway, the skyscraper, the tenement bank, the tattoo parlor, a heaven ̀growing in the street/right up through the concrete, but soft and sweet and dreaming."---Kevin Killian, Author, Little Men --Book Jacket.
Poet-essayist Charles Siebert writes the first urban pastoral--a meditation on nature in the tradition of "Walden" and "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" that leads inexorably to an open-hearted celebration of the modern city.
What has the city meant to Americans? James L. Machor explores this question in a provocative analysis of American responses to urbanization in the context of the culture's tendency to valorize nature and the rural world. Although much attention has been paid to American rural-urban relations, Machor focuses on a dimension largely overlooked by those seeking to explain American conceptions of the city. While urban historians and literary critics have explicitly or implicitly emphasized the opposition between urban and rural sensibilities in America, an equally important feature of American thought and writing has been the widespread interest in collapsing that division. Convinced that the native landscape has offered special opportunities, Americans since the age of settlement have sought to build a harmonious urban-pastoral society combining the best of both worlds. Moreover, this goal has gone largely unchallenged in the culture except for the sophisticated responses in the writings of some of America's most eminent literary artists. Pastoral Cities explains the development of urban pastoralism from its origins in the prophetic vision of the New Jerusalem, applied to America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through its secularization in the urban planning and reform of the 1800s. Machor critiques the sophisticated treatment of urban pastoralism by writers such as Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Wharton, and James by skillfully by combining cultural analysis with a close reading of urban plans, travel narratives, sermons, and popular novels. The product of this multifaceted approach is an analysis that works to reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of the pastoral ideal as cultural mythology.
How business appropriated the pastoral landscape, as seen in the corporate campus, the corporate estate, and the office park. By the end of the twentieth century, America's suburbs contained more office space than its central cities. Many of these corporate workplaces were surrounded, somewhat incongruously, by verdant vistas of broad lawns and leafy trees. In Pastoral Capitalism, Louise Mozingo describes the evolution of these central (but often ignored) features of postwar urbanism in the context of the modern capitalist enterprise. These new suburban corporate landscapes emerged from a historical moment when corporations reconceived their management structures, the city decentralized and dispersed into low-density, auto-dependent peripheries, and the pastoral—in the form of leafy residential suburbs—triumphed as an American ideal. Greenness, writes Mozingo, was associated with goodness, and pastoral capitalism appropriated the suburb's aesthetics and moral code. Like the lawn-proud suburban homeowner, corporations understood a pastoral landscape's capacity to communicate identity, status, and right-mindedness. Mozingo distinguishes among three forms of corporate landscapes—the corporate campus, the corporate estate, and the office park—and examines suburban corporate landscapes built and inhabited by such companies as Bell Labs, General Motors, Deere & Company, and Microsoft. She also considers the globalization of pastoral capitalism in Europe and the developing world including Singapore, India, and China. Mozingo argues that, even as it is proliferating, pastoral capitalism needs redesign, as do many of our metropolitan forms, for pressing social, cultural, political, and environmental reasons. Future transformations are impossible, however, unless we understand the past. Pastoral Capitalism offers an indispensible chapter in urban history, examining not only the design of corporate landscapes but also the economic, social, and cultural models that determined their form.
Drawing on their research involving urban pastors from across the United States, Bryan Stone and Claire Wolfteich identify and examine spiritual practices that foster excellence in urban ministry. After discussing the specific challenges facing urban pastors and presenting the kinds of excellence required of them, Stone and Wolfteich explore several practices that help sustain ministers working in urban contexts, such as cultivating holy friendships, practicing Sabbath, maintaining lives of prayer and study, and setting appropriate boundaries. Throughout, the authors weave together stories from urban pastors from a variety of denominations with insights from the history of Christian spirituality and theology to chart a theological course for the formation and renewal of pastors in diverse contemporary contexts.
Reimagining Mission from Urban Places offers much needed reflection about the nature of mission and about expectations for missional outcomes. Using the stories of team members within the Eden Network (which emphasises an 'incarnational' approach to urban mission) the book demonstrates that at its best, mission happens in a shared life rather than being about 'us' telling the listening world.
If the church is to thrive in the twenty-first century, it will have to take on a new form as it ministers to the 120 million unchurched people in the United States. Planting and Growing Urban Churches is still virtually the only available text on church planting in North America and beyond. In this third edition, readers will find material on the importance of healthy, biblical change in our churches, updated appendices, insight on our postmodern ministry context, and strategies for reaching new population demographics such as Generation X and Y. Pastors, ministry leaders, and church planters will find the information and advice found in this book invaluable as they carry out their ministries.
Bold and skilled, Francis takes us into the still landscapes of Texas, evoking the African American South in fluid detail. Her poems become panhandle folktales fraught with the weight of memories both individual and collective. Her creative tangle of metaphors, people, and geography will keep the reader rooted in the good earth of extraordinary verse.
"Harryette Mullen is a magician of words, phrases, and songs . . . No voice in contemporary poetry is quite as original, cosmopolitan, witty, and tragic." —Susan Stewart, citation for the Academy of American Poets Fellowship Urban tumbleweed, some people call it, discarded plastic bag we see in every city blown down the street with vagrant wind. —from Urban Tumbleweed Urban Tumbleweed is the poet Harryette Mullen's exploration of spaces where the city and the natural world collide. Written out of a daily practice of walking, Mullen's stanzas adapt the traditional Japanese tanka, a poetic form suited for recording fleeting impressions, describing environmental transitions, and contemplating the human being's place in the natural world. But, as she writes in her preface, "What is natural about being human? What to make of a city dweller taking a ‘nature walk' in a public park while listening to a podcast with ear-bud headphones?"
