Marginal Christianity

Our culture has once again begun to realize the significance of the local, of place, of being rooted. In contrast, Enlightenment thinkers subsumed particular “place” to universal “space.” At least this is the argument made by phenomenologists like Martin Heidegger, who believed that  Truth  could be  revealed  only by carefully attending to the things and people nearest to us. The philosophical recovery of particularity converged nicely with a late-modern cultural nostalgia for the local, a concept lost amid the big box stores and MacDonaldized franchises now homogenizing every square inch of the United States. [1] There is increasing evidence in our communities of this “late-modern cultural nostalgia for the local” which I believe is much more than nostalgia, even as we wrestle with conflicting values and structures in its pursuit. [2]  As one couple in our Neighbourhood Life missional community reflected, “We’ve learned the importance of proximity especial...

http://iasc-culture.org/THR/channels/Common_Place/2014/12/there-goes-the-neighborhood/ by Stephen Assink First published as an article in 1995, Robert Putnam’s famous book,   Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community ,  solidified many Americans’ concern about the disappearance of community life. Nearly 20 years later, this worry has only increased, as other scholars— Charles Murray , Claude Fischer , Bill Bishop , and Theda Skocpol —have continued to document this social trend. Marc Dunkelman’s  The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community  is the latest iteration of this ongoing dialogue. At the core of Dunkelman’s transformation thesis is the subtle hollowing-out of the “middle-ring” relationships that historically defined American social life. These relationships according to Dunkelman: are defined by a familiarity that allows acquaintances to carry on conversations about personal subjects eve...