The Spiritual City: Theology, Spirituality, and the Urban by Philip Sheldrake (review)

Throughout his career, Philip Sheldrake has been interested in the significance of place. In a series of articles and book chapters over the past decade and a half, he has devoted sustained attention to one type of place in particular, the city. As someone who has lived in New York City for the past six years, I applaud Sheldrake for bringing the topic of the city forward as worthy of serious reflection, because living here poses a unique set of challenges. The discipline of Christian Spirituality has given a lot of attention recently to the natural world, and deservedly so. Nature is a powerful place of divine encounter, and concern for its well-being is critical in our age of ecological crisis. Wilderness is a holy place for me as well, but for a variety of reasons, it is difficult for me to get out of the city. I must find God here, and so must most of my fellow New Yorkers. Sheldrake deserves much credit for turning our attention to the city, the place where the majority of human beings live their everyday lives.

In the Introduction, Sheldrake lays the foundation on which he will assemble his evidence and build his argument. First, cities are an important topic to consider because an increasing percentage of the human population lives in them, and they are projected to keep growing in the future. In 1950, twenty-nine percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas. This grew to fifty percent in 1990 and is predicted to rise to seventy percent by 2050. Cities shape those who live there. Because so many are being formed by this particular kind of place, Sheldrake believes it is critical to think about the values that cities instill in those who reside in them. Second, he takes up the critique of sociologist Richard Sennett, who criticizes Christianity for an anti-urban bias. In his discussion of Augustine’s City of God, Sennett claims that Christianity encourages the nurturing of a private, inner world that de-emphasizes public life. Sheldrake counters Sennett’s criticism by strongly asserting that Christians do not discern their identities through an interior search for a hidden true self. For him, one’s identity is realized in interaction with others, which makes the public realm essential to the Christian life.

The book is divided into two parts. In the five chapters of Part One Sheldrake surveys a variety of figures in the history of spirituality in search of resources that might be useful in funding a Christian vision for the contemporary city. He devotes entire chapters to Augustine’s reflections on the earthly city and the city of God in light of the decline of Rome, monasteries as ideal human communities, the renewal of cities in Europe between 1150 and 1250 (which included the building of cathedrals and the rise of universities, the mendicant orders, and the Beguines), the Protestant and Catholic Reformations of the sixteenth century, and the Jesuit scholar Michel de Certeau’s writings on cities. In his review of this material, he refers to an impressive array of historical sources and contemporary scholars. One shortcoming of the book is that, other than Augustine and the Ignatian tradition, he treats each of these authors very briefly. I often wanted to read more about a suggestive idea, only for it to disappear quickly as he moved on to the next source. The chapter on de Certeau is the strongest in Part One, in part because Sheldrake dives so deeply into his work.

Sheldrake constructs his theology of the city in the four chapters of Part Two. Several threads of his argument are worth highlighting. First, he articulates a Christian understanding of community. Christians affirm that God is Trinity, which means that God is a relationship of three interrelated persons. Since human beings are created in the image of God, Sheldrake affirms that they are not isolated individuals, but beings in relationship...