Parishioners of a historic church in Detroit want to develop eight vacant blocks with missing-middle housing to build a church-centered community.
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Up to one-third of all houses of worship in the United States will have closed over the next few years. What will we do with the spaces they leave behind?
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In some places, houses of worship have formed interfaith coalitions, and do valuable work on social justice issues—but what if they also addressed issues of economics and place?
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What if religious congregations are the “sleeping giant” of the Strong Towns movement?
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Not only did car culture change how we build cities, it changed how (and how often) we encounter other people.
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There are many entry points to the Strong Towns conversation. For our content manager, it was asking big questions about how our cities’ development patterns can either bring people together or keep them apart.
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Patrick Deneen, author of the bestselling Why Liberalism Failed (hint: he doesn’t mean the political left), talks with our own Chuck Marohn about the political crisis facing Western societies, and how rediscovering a sense of rootedness in community—defaulting to loyalty over “looking for the exits”—might be the answer.
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It’s not just those who work in or with local government who have something to offer to the Strong Towns movement. Our work touches on deeper questions of how we live in community, and this is why we seek to learn from psychologists, philosophers, historians, and—in one classic 2013 podcast interview—even a religious scholar.
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One of the reasons Ocean Grove, New Jersey has endured intact is the presence of a religious community that had a higher calling and a longer event horizon than the dominant secular culture. There are lessons to be learned here even by people who may not identify with the church.
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Neither raw commerce nor government bureaucracies can ever deliver the same quality results as a close-knit subculture. This is quite evident in the community kitchens of the Sikhs.
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Church leaders around the country should be doing everything they can to reconnect the social bonds of our communities. We reconnect the social bonds most easily and effectively when we reconnect the physical bonds. We should be obsessed with getting people out of their cars and back into each other’s lives.
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For a city to get there, current priorities need to be realigned and everyone -- from the mayor, the city engineer, the maintenance worker and everyone in between -- needs to be working to get more value out of our existing investments.
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