The City and Congregation Workgroup
Meeting Highlights
- First Meeting
Charlottesville, VA
July 2, 2002 - Second Meeting
Charlottesville, VA
September 27, 2002 - Third Meeting
Los Angeles, CA
November 6 - 10, 2002 - Fourth Meeting
Charlottesville, VA
February 7, 2003 - Fifth Meeting
Charlottesville, VA
March 7, 2003 - Sixth Meeting
Charlottesville, VA
May 1, 2003
Sixth Meeting
Charlottesville, VA
May 1, 2003
Narrative
On May 1, 2003, the City and Congregation workgroup convened at the Bonhoeffer House for its final meeting before the Lived Theology Conference in June. The group hosted Mary Bauer, legal director of the Virginia Justice Center for Farm and Immigrant Workers, and Daphne Spain, professor of urban planning at the University of Virginia and author of How Women Saved the City.
The session with Mrs. Bauer focused on the working conditions of migrant workers throughout the state of Virginia. Bauer highlighted the often appalling living conditions of workers (cold, damp warehouses in which small spaces are rented at over $1000 a month), and discussed several lawsuits that her office has prosecuted on behalf of these workers. Bauer's presentation communicated the urgent necessity for churches to respond to the needs of their Latino brothers and sisters, in far deeper ways than the church is presently responding. No issue considered by the workgroup this year has come across as more pressing than this one. If the church is to be the church in Charlottesville, its ecclesial identity must be bound up with the plight of its ill-housed, ill-paid immigrant neighbors.
Daphne Spain delivered an immensely useful presentation on the religious origins of many progressive-era social movements, citing the influence of Social Gospel theology and the work of groups like the Salvation Army and Young Women's Christian Association. Central to Spain's presentation was the notion of 'redemptive places,' the term she gives to spaces in the urban landscape that reclaim the human dimension of the architectural imagination. Redemptive places are buildings, refuges, parks, playgrounds, etc. that function as concrete theaters of ideologies or worldviews. Here the consequences of ideas (and their antecedents) play out in real time and space. While focusing on the many redemptive places of the Progressive era, Spain traced the evolution of these spaces through the present-day. She ended by boldly asking who will continue to build new redemptive places today, and for whom these indispensable theaters will be built.
Readings
- Spain, Daphne. How Women Saved the City. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2001.