Content & Context

Article

By Nathan Bierma

Content & Context

The Books & Culture Weblog

October 2003

This Week:

Resonance: Sacred Spaces
Places & Culture
City Scene: St. Paul
Weekly Digest

RESONANCE: SACRED SPACES

Relevant articles and reflections on William Westfall's "How Should a Church Look?" in B&C:

My first glimpse inside Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago came in the 1997 movie My Best Friend's Wedding, in the scene where Cameron Diaz races down the center aisle to congratulate the supposedly engaged Julia Roberts, her squeals echoing throughout the venerable church's sanctuary. Talk about church becoming theatre, as Jeanne Halgren Kilde does in a book reviewed by William Westfall in the September/October issue of B&C.

Now that my wife and I have begun regularly attending Fourth, I have taken a more deliberate interest in studying the physical space that encompasses our Sunday morning worship. Until I took the building tour and picked up the church's brochure about its architecture, I remained, as do most worshipers, largely oblivious to the symbolism of its physical features (which I discuss here at my Chicago scrapbook).

Fourth is not only an essential outpost of the gospel to the proximate Cabrini-Green housing projects, it is also welcome respite from the commercial onslaught of Michigan Avenue, onto which its doors open. The church was built in the 1920s on unwanted real estate across from an open field; now the malls and high-rises of the "Magnificent Mile" bear down on it from all sides. So its interior is a place to ponder the immaterial amid the siren calls of materialism.

Still, I wonder if Fourth itself is becoming something to look at, another stop for tourists traversing its mall-lined block. Such is the fate of any site of a Hollywood movie, especially in Chicago, with its inferiority complex over film fame. Add to that the anonymity that comes with a church that size (and its high proportion of visitors each week), and soon the magnificent building and its historic institution detract attention from the task of forming a community of believers. And so I get queasy when the architecture brochure I picked up digresses from the intricate theological symbolism of the neo-Gothic church and starts talking about how the family of Cyrus McCormick, the inventor of the reaper and co-founder of Fourth's predecessor, endowed the east window—like a tribute to an historic social club.

In an essay reprinted recently in First Things, Duncan Stroik, editor of the journal Sacred Architecture, warns of the extreme end of this worship of buildings, as he laments that many of the grandest cathedrals in Italy are charging visitors admission fees. This is in the interest of preservation more than profit, but even so, Stroik says, "it also means that fourteen of the major churches including the Frari and the Redentore are entrance by admission only." As a result, the churches are "not really serving their highest purpose: the praise of God and the bestowal of grace on [humans]," and are missing "an opportunity to be hospitable, to welcome the saint, the sinner, and the prodigal." He calls this "pay-per-view religion."

In America, where church membership is higher and church buildings better maintained, this danger is more remote. Still, this tension between being in awe of our worship spaces and letting them enhance our awe of whom we worship tugs throughout Westfall's review. How do we sharpen our "reading [of] architectural space," as Westfall says, but stop short of projecting our adulation onto the buildings themselves? How fitting that Westfall's essay appeared in a cover package that led off with John Witvliet's essay on worship and discernment.

As long as we can avoid loving our earthly temples too much, I hope the writing of Kilde, Westfall, Stroik, and Alison Lurie—whose two-part essay in the New York Review of Books on Kilde's and four related new books is a useful companion to Westfall's essay—call us to take a renewed interest in how our physical places of worship shape what happens inside them. To that end, I'd like to propose a moratorium on churches lending their facilities to romantic comedies with Hollywood superstars.

Linked above:

PLACES & CULTURE

From the New York Times :

MACHANGPING, China — The trip from [the] village of Xiapu to the town here takes an hour, though the distance is only three miles, the asphalt is perfectly smooth and traffic jams are unheard of. But such is life when a new road is used by local residents mainly for walking, not driving. … What the official New China News Agency calls a "nationwide fever of highway construction" has created a network of highways that totaled 875,000 miles two years ago and is projected to reach 1.06 million miles in 2010. In congested cities like Beijing and Shanghai, the number of personal vehicles has soared. … But the Guixin Highway, which opened a couple of years ago, illustrates how national ambitions do not always translate into local realities. … In the villages few people can afford cars. Farmers and workers walk along the clean asphalt shoulder of the four-lane highway. They carry scythes and straw baskets, fruits and vegetables on wooden shoulder poles. They haul heavy equipment, overnight bags, infants. There are occasional trucks or tour buses. Summary*

DENVER — For decades tourists have been coming to the Mile High City and posing for pictures at precisely 5,283.03 feet above sea level. Perhaps now they would like to come back and get a shot at 5,280 feet, exactly one mile high. It seems there was some confusion over the years as to exactly where the celebrated spot falls on the Capitol's steps. In 1909, officials tried to keep a marker on the 15th step, but in 1947 etched in the words "One Mile Above Sea Level" after the plaque was repeatedly stolen. Engineers in 1969 determined that a new marker should be placed on the 18th step. But this week Gov. Bill Owens heeded land surveyors and moved the point to the 13th step—3.03 feet down—and installed a third marker. The governor joked that someone should have carved the word "about" before the inscription on the 15th step. Nothing has caused the city to rise appreciably or the steps to sink, but … new technology has changed the way measurements are taken. Summary*

CITY SCENE: ST. PAUL

This week, another friend and fellow Michiganian, Phil Christman, writes of his first impressions of his new surroundings in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Mark Twain, in a suspiciously buddy-buddy moment, wrote of "wonderful" St. Paul, a city "put together in solid blocks of honest brick and stone … [which] has the air of intending to stay." More prosaically, the guidebook I consulted before moving here six months ago told me to expect a city with the lovely inefficiency of a European capital, and that's what I've found. The abbreviated downtown area is all high-rise office buildings and apartment complexes—ancient warehouses converted to artists' studio space—all visible in one glance from the top of Cathedral Hill. To the west are streets like Summit, Selby and Grand with their dignified, crafted opulence, some of it surprisingly affordable—many beautiful '20s houses have been apportioned into apartment spaces, thus enabling friends of mine to live in the building where a young F. Scott Fitzgerald took dancing lessons. To the east is blight, with some bright spots (Mounds Park on the waning, cool end of a summer day can't be beat). The downtown coffee shops close earlier than those I left in Grand Rapids, Michigan, for pity's sake, but the art scene is vital. Many local artists throw open their studios during the twice-yearly Art Crawl (like a pub crawl, but with art); all kinds of bookstores and music stores pop up as you move West toward Minneapolis; and in the middle of downtown stands majestic First Baptist, where a satellite congregation called House of Mercy operates its own art gallery as well as Sunday-night services where Johnny Cash is sung. St. Paul doesn't need to be Minneapolis; behind all the "honest brick" is quirk enough for anybody.

WEEKLY DIGEST

For links with an * you can log in with member name and password of "bcread"

• Wal-Mart is hoping to do what no one has since the Mongols in the 1200s: conquer China. The mega retailer already has 29 stores in 13 Chinese cities and plans to build new ones in Beijing, Shanghai, and elsewhere. But local and European retailers are putting up more resistance than Wal-Mart encountered on its home continent, as Business Week reported in a sidebar to a cover story on Wal-Mart last month. Full story

Related:

The Wal-Marting of America from The Week magazine
Wal-Mart gets too much blame, says Daniel Gross in Slate
From The Onion (satire): Wal-Mart Store #3297 speaks out

• Forget the sports teams, convention centers, tax breaks for corporate headquarters, and other surefire ways city mayors try to reverse the flight from their cities. What mid-sized cities need are young professionals. Or so goes the latest conventional wisdom among mid-sized cities from Memphis to Milwaukee, Tampa to Toledo, says USA Today. While the top ten largest U.S cities have thriving yuppie populations, two-thirds of the rest of the top 50 lost young adults during the 1990s, according to the Census. Accepting author Richard Florida's thesis that a young "creative class" is an economic necessity, cities are using Web sites, arts festivals and recruiting summits to beckon to them. Full story Before you read much more by fans of Florida, beware their common (and flawed) assumption that Christianity is anti-creativity and thus anti-growth.

Earlier in this weblog:the economics of sports stadiums

One way to mark the passage of time is to observe how soon it takes for a decade to become 'vintage.' The return of merchandise for 1980s staples such as Hello Kitty, Strawberry Shortcake, Scooby Doo, He-Man, and Care Bears has Kara Baskin feeling nostalgic at The New Republic online. Not only are golden oldies more reliable for marketers than a new product, but they promise familiarity in a disorienting age. "Retrospectives, reruns, and reissues are now our refuge," Baskin writes. Full story* This is a familiar variation on the Eighties-stuff-is-back story that has been making the rounds since September 11 (surfacing noticeably in this May 2002 feature in the New York Times ). Although it resonates with me, whose childhood coincided with the Eighties, I do have some questions. Why did the Fox network's That 70s Show succeed while its short-lived That 80s Show failed? Wasn't the Cold War arms race as chilling a national security crisis as Al Qaeda's terrorism, jeopardizing nostalgia for that era? And finally, most disturbing of all: how soon will vintage Nineties memorabilia be here?
l; Earlier this month, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced an overhaul of the city's regulation of homeless hotels. For two decades, the city has been paying owners of hotels and apartment buildings to house homeless families—as many as 40,000 people every night. But recent investigations by the city comptroller and WNYC public radio found squalid conditions among these accommodations. WNYC's report of a tour of homeless hotels aired on National Public Radio. Summary with audio link
Related: Summaries of New York Times articles on mayor's homeless hotels announcement and a threatened temporary homeless community near Portland, Oregon.
The belief that American children have too much homework is a myth, says a new study by the Brookings Institution, which found the average student's homework load to be about 20 minutes a night. In an editorial, the Chicago Tribune suspects "that reality lies somewhere between the noisy complaints about homework in some households and the 'What, us worry?' attitude of the folks at Brookings." The solution, the editorial says, lies in honesty with ourselves about our crowded calendars. "There's a simple way to test this theory. Parents, ask yourselves: If my child had less homework, what would we do with the extra time? Would our family spend more hours together, just enjoying each other? Or would we sign up for some new structured activity to fill the void?" Full story/excerpt
Yesterday, Pope John Paul II marked last week's 25th anniversary of his papacy by beatifying Mother Teresa—the penultimate step to her sainthood. While Mother Teresa was special, she will be the 470th person to be canonized under the current papacy. Before Pope John Paul II, there were only about 300 other saints. Recently, 60 Minutes wondered why "the Vatican has become a 'saint factory,'" explaining how sainthood happens, what miracles have to do with it, and why Pope John Paul II has immortalized so many. Companion story at CBSNews.com.