Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Farm or Country?
Should our community eventually lead people out of the city? Is city life against are goals for Christian community? Doug and I wondered this as we drove from the bucolic paradise of N. Michigan to Toronto. Is it just a matter of aesthetic preference: fresh air over smog, fields over buildings, woods over playground? Or is there something about the city that stunts people: their moral development, there common feeling towards others, there sense of wholeness and responsibility.
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By the way, in our discussion, I came down firmly on the side of country. I think modern big cities are terrible schools for vice and that the best we can do for folks is to help them out to the country. Slightly overstated, but not by much.
I just read an article in Harper's that discussed the way that the city is percieved in fundamentalist and evangelical circles as "profane, evil, seat of sin" and the author suggested that this often coded a kind of racism. Which I am hoping doesn't implicate Doug and I. Nonetheless, I am wondering: "can the country open itself up to people of other races?" Are the "goods" of the country culturally specific?
One more thing. I am wondering if this doesn't track back to the Catholicism and Anabaptist discussion. At least insofar as Catholicism is often an urban religion, ethnically diverse... and anabaptists are often rural and ethnically homogeneous.
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