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Theology and Geography

In elementary school one of my social studies assignments was to memorize the fifty states and their capitals, a geographic task that still eludes me today. Even by the time I got to college, I cannot say that I understood geography to be about much more than naming the many different places on maps. Perhaps for you the term geography simply elicits the same images—a globe with many labels, or detailed maps with pins and boundaries. Well, it turns out that the field of geography is in fact much more than maps, and while physical geography is indeed concerned with topography, cartography, and the like, it is human and cultural geography that will be a point of focus in this book.

Human and cultural geographies explore how people and communities understand their environments, particularly in terms of space and place. Even more specifically, urban geography often focuses on the built environment of cities, and the ways in which people make sense of the places where they live, work, and play. The reality that we construct meaning from our geography is both practical and theological. Not only is it impossible to abstract our lives from our physical environment, but it is also an essential theological truism that context—linguistic, cultural, geographic, and otherwise—powerfully shapes our Christian faith and practice, and always has.

Jesus of Nazareth was a first-century recognition that Jesus came from, and was shaped by, a particular place and the local communities found there. The Sea of Galilee, the region of Samaria, the road to Jericho, the city of Jerusalem, and the hillsides, homes, and synagogues therein were specific geographies that defined Jesus’ life and ministry.

Stand in the Place Where You Live

Think about the sorts of places that have shaped your life. The 1989 R.E.M. song “Stand” suggests that we think about place: “Stand in the place where you live. . . . Think about direction, wonder why you haven’t before.”1 How often do you think about the place where you live? In between the hours of commuting, screen time, and the busy routines of the rat race, do we ever pause to really pay attention to the geography around us? And by “pay attention,” I mean linger and contemplate longer than it takes for the traffic light to change. But who has time for that?

Long before I began my formal studies in theology, I was inhabiting spaces and places that shaped my faith. Often this shaping was subtle and unintentional, or so it seemed. Sanctuaries and shopping malls were like the geographic wallpaper of my life: noticeable, and at times decorative, but not all that important in the grand scheme of things. However, as I’ve come to understand my own story and the forces that have shaped my Christian identity, it’s become impossible for me to ignore the structures and textures of the variety of places that have made me who I am. In the same way that a liquid fills the shape of its container, places—specifically urban places—have shaped my life like a mold.

Place, simply put for now, is how humans make sense of geography or location. It’s the meaning and memory we attach to spaces we inhabit, the physical context of our lives. Place is the sense of home we feel in a familiar house, or on a certain street. It’s the idea of holy ground or sacred land—the suggestion that dirt or concrete might be more than the sum of its parts. We ought to truly pay attention to the places in our lives, specifically the places that make cities what they are. For many years, my friend Ray Bakke has been saying that the Christian story “begins in a garden and ends in a city,”2 and part of the assumption behind that observation is that gardens and cities are not simply spaces for plants and streets. Rather, they are the essential and specific environments in which we begin to make sense of our world—the world that God has created and redeemed, and intends to restore.

Just Down the Street

Over the years, I’ve lived on a lot of different streets. From the time I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to the year I started college at the University of Washington in Seattle, I had moved over ten times, amassing a large collection of home addresses along the way. Many of the streets I can vaguely recall, but my most vivid childhood memories return to Lindley Drive in suburban Raleigh, North Carolina.

Lindley Drive was a quiet, tree-lined residential street that ended in a classic suburban cul-de-sac that served as the default recreation area for all the neighborhood kids. Packs of us would run, ride, and play up and down the block until the sun went down. All the families knew each other, and we were in and out of different neighbors’ homes all the time. I’m not sure how my parents always knew where my sisters and I were at any given time, but we always managed to find our way back home. Throughout the barbecues, summer sweet tea, and long games of hide-and-seek, many tastes of Southern hospitality are etched in my memory. It never occurred to me that we were the only Asian family on our street (and probably in the entire neighborhood), and aside from the occasional curiosity about what was being served for dinner, I hadn’t a clue what it meant to be “Asian,” let alone third-generation Chinese American. In that sense, ignorance was bliss.

Lindley Drive as I remember it stands in stark contrast to some very different streets in Detroit that I drove down in the winter of 2010, the year my grandfather passed away. Before World War II, my grandparents emigrated from southern China to Detroit, where they worked for decades in the city running a Chinese laundry. But over time as the city changed, like most folks who weren’t African American they moved to the outer suburbs, fleeing the predominantly black neighborhoods that made up most of the city. As the funeral procession drove south into Detroit toward Forest Lawn Cemetery, we crossed the outer roads, each one named by its mile marker from the downtown area. 12 Mile Road, 11 Mile Road, 10 . . . and as we crossed the infamous 8 Mile Road, the historical racial boundary between the city of Detroit and its northern suburbs, the streets started to change in dramatic fashion.

Block by block, storefronts became more dilapidated, corners more abandoned, except for the occasional liquor store or mini-mart, and the general feeling of decay was displayed in a drab palette of gray concrete and cracked asphalt. Some blocks felt nearly apocalyptic, with burned-out properties that seemed long deserted. For me, the fact that we were mourning the death of my grandfather was framed by another kind of sadness—the apparent loss and decline of communities that once thrived. Though urban Detroit is not without signs of life and rejuvenation today, much of the city is still marred by years of neglect and questions about the future. I often wonder when the streets of Detroit will flourish again. What would it take to see hope restored in a place like Detroit, where multiple members of my family first put down their roots in pursuit of the American dream?

Questions that arise from the streets where we live, work, and play are not only for the residents of those particular places. Rather, it’s important to remember how the urban geographies that frame much of our lives—the places we sleep, garden, worship, and greet neighbors—are not simply incidental to our schedules and priorities. In fact, the very fabric of our most deeply held beliefs and values, including our cultural identities themselves, are intimately shaped by cul-de-sacs and grocery stores, parking lots and freeway overpasses, and the lives of others we encounter there.

What can we learn about our communities and ourselves as we examine the disparities between the Lindley Drives and 8 Mile Roads of our increasingly urbanized world? Urban scholar John Rennie Short puts it succinctly in The Urban Order: “Cities . . . are a mirror of our societies, a part of our economy, an element of our environments. But above all else they are a measure of our ability to live with each other. When we examine our cities, we examine ourselves.”3 I agree that some self-examination is in order.

Walls and bridges didn’t build themselves, and neither did Walmart or public housing just show up overnight. How should we feel about the urban environment we’ve built for ourselves? These fixtures of our cities are reflections of us and our collective understanding (or misunderstanding) of life together. Streets are much more than concrete and asphalt—they are physical manifestations of the lifeblood of our neighborhoods. They are signs, both pragmatic and instructive, as well as deeply symbolic and meaningful. On the surface, street signs identify and direct, but in a broader sense, street signs are all around us. How might we begin to read these signs more deeply in order to glean all they have to say to us?

Signs of the Times

“And now the end has come. So listen to my piece of advice: exegesis, exegesis, and yet more exegesis! Keep to the Word, to the Scripture that has been given to us.”4 These parting words of Karl Barth to his German students in 1935 reflect the absolute importance of reading Scripture closely, and the centrality of critical interpretation in understanding the Bible...