From Madison.com
From the Badger Herald: The Common Council; The Plan Commission
From the Daily Cardinal: The Common Council; The Plan Commission
Updated: Isthmus chimed in as well
At about 1:15 this morning, Madison’s Common Council approved by a vote of 15-4 the redevelopment proposal for the St. Francis House property. It has been a long process, with a lot of passion and energy on both sides.
Later today, the really hard work will begin of rebuilding relationships with those who opposed the project and working with them to ensure that in the process of construction and after the buildings are completed, the concerns of our neighbors are heard, and problems addressed.
This was a completely new experience for me. I had never witnessed democracy in action on quite this level. I had never participated so directly in hearings and debates, nor watched, for a total of over 14 hours, city committees and the city council at work. I don’t know how they do it. Before coming to our items on the agenda, they had to deal with issues related to employees and firefighters’ benefits. Councillors had to put up with dozens of emails from us, countless conversations. They told of spending a day exploring every nook and cranny of Luther Memorial, or checking to see what the moped situation was like outside of Grand Central. They were thoughtful, open, and are dedicated both to the concerns of their constituents and to the city as a whole. With the budget crisis facing them, they were able to laugh with each other, and with us, as well. There was incredible tension in the room at times, and there were also moments of levity. I hope not to have to go through something like this again in the near future, or ever, for that matter, but it was exciting and educational.
I think I’ll go to bed after I finish this beer.
As I wrote early this morning, our proposal was approved by the Plan Commission. Now it’s on to the Common Council.
Here are the comments I made during last night’s public hearing:
Good Evening. I am Jonathan Grieser, the rector—priest, at Grace Episcopal Church on Capitol Square. I am a member of the board of St. Francis House, and have shared in the deliberations over the future of that ministry. The proposal that comes before you is the product of three years of prayerful discernment and consultation with our neighbors. We have adapted the proposal to address Luther Memorial Church’s concerns. I believe this project deserves Plan Commission approval. It accomplishes some long-term goals of the city—in-fill development, moving student housing closer to campus. Moreover, by returning this property to the tax rolls, it will add to the city coffers in this time of fiscal challenges.
I do not want to downplay LMC’s concerns about noise, congestion, and vandalism. Their concerns are common to urban churches across the country, including my own. We struggle with parking restrictions for everything from Ride the Drive to the Ironman Triathlon, with noise from protestors, parades, and Capitol Square events like Art Fair on the Square or Taste of Madison, which in addition to noise and parking, offers our worshippers smells from countless food carts. It is a rare Sunday that doesn’t bring some event or group to the Capitol. As the site for the men’s Drop-In shelter operated by Porchlight, our efforts to put our faith into action bring their own set of challenges.
Urban ministry can be a challenge, but I’m sure my Lutheran colleagues would no sooner abandon their location than we would abandon ours on the corner of N. Carroll and W. Washington Ave. Whatever the challenges, the opportunities for ministry and mission are much greater. For us, those opportunities involve our neighborhood on Capitol Square; for Luther Memorial, it is the opportunity of sharing God’s word in the heart of a great university. The passionate involvement of so many LMC members in this process is proof of the vitality of that congregation and evidence of the bright future that lies ahead for it, no matter what happens tonight.
None of the challenges I’ve mentioned, nor the issues raised by LMC, constitute a threat to ministry. They are opportunities that require careful attention, cooperation, and adaptation. The board of St. Francis House seriously considered the possibility of abandoning our location, but we rejected that option, convinced that our location offered exciting opportunities for campus ministry that could not be met in any other way. Our decision to stay and our commitment to this development proposal is also a commitment to the neighborhood, a commitment to make it a vibrant and livable community for all of its residents and all those who work and worship in it.
We don’t know what the future holds. We do know that the status quo cannot be maintained. We know that we must adapt to meet the changing needs of students, and the changing nature of our larger community. This development is our attempt to do just that, to create sustainable, exciting, adaptable ministry into the future. We look forward to working closely with our Lutheran neighbors to ensure the vitality of our ministries and our neighborhood. I urge you to support this proposal.
The Episcopal Lead asks the question, following up on an article about Sacramento churches that includes some info about Trinity Episcopal Cathedral. The Very Rev’d Brian Baker’s response is very much in keeping with my own. I tell parishioners that anyone asking for assistance on Sunday should be brought to me. We have a list available of meals programs, and I used to say, before the Salvation Army quit serving breakfast, that on Sundays you could eat for free in downtown Madison pretty much all day long.
I don’t want to be crass or insensitive to people’s needs, but I do think it’s important that people be allowed to worship and take part in Sunday programs free of harassment. We have homeless people who come to services and to coffee hour, and occasionally, they will hit parishioners up for money. It’s hard to say no, especially when the gospel that day has something to do with selling all and giving to the poor. But panhandling can be a nuisance, especially in Madison. One parishioner who works downtown carries new pairs of socks in his coat pockets in winter, and when asked for money, offers socks instead.
The Plan Commission meeting began at 6:00 pm; they got to our agenda item around 9:00, but we needed to be there by 6:00 if we wanted to register to speak. At 11:30 or so, it was over. The Plan Commission approved the redesign of the project by a 4-3 vote. Now we have another meeting. Tomorrow night, it’s the Common Council.
And I thought faculty meetings or diocesan convention were interminable; this evening’s meeting made both of those experiences seem action-packed and entertaining.
September 18, 2011
The kingdom of heaven is like…
This is the way Jesus introduces many of his parables in the Gospel of Matthew. In Luke and Mark, the phrase used is “the kingdom of God is like…” The parables are meant to help Jesus’ listeners—and us, listening in 2000 years later, to catch a glimpse of this new realm of existence that Jesus is proclaiming. The parables are meant to teach, to shed light on this new existence, but they are also meant to shock and unsettle us, for the kingdom of heaven, the reign of God, is, above all else, something that transcends and challenges all human values, all expectations, all of our comfortable ways of thinking about things and living. Continue reading
There have been more articles about the proposed cuts to human services in the Dane County budget. Hearings have been taking place this week, and Pat Schneider of the Cap Times has been asking hard questions about the proposed cuts in funding to the Salvation Army’s Warming House (the warming house provides mattresses for homeless families in the SA’s headquarters when their shelter overflows). Also on the cutting floor is the county’s support for Community Action Coalition, which serves Dane County food pantries. Lynn Green, director of the Human Services department, rationalizes the cuts in this way:
“This community cares. It does what it can to fill in the gaps,” Green told me in an interview Friday. Church groups and others already run food and clothing programs, she says. “I believe this is something this community can rally around and pick up.”
David Brooks’ latest op-ed is getting a lot of attention. He is commenting on a study done by Christian Smith et al, Lost in Transition. Brooks writes:
Smith and company found an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism — of relativism and nonjudgmentalism. Again, this doesn’t mean that America’s young people are immoral. Far from it. But, Smith and company emphasize, they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America.
Adam J. Copeland ponders Brooks’ article and concludes:
I look forward to reading Smith’s book, but I’ll do so uneasily. When I somehow find the time to pick it up, I’ll do so with this question at the forefront of my mind: Is it that young adults truly have fewer moral resources with which to deal with moral questions than previous generations, or is it that today’s questions are so much more complex that young adults need more skills and understanding to just tread water in our consumeristic pluralized technologically-advanced globalized world?
After all, it’s much easier to teach and theologize that “murder is wrong” than it is to discuss unmanned drone strikes in remote border areas of Afghanistan/Pakistan during an unfunded “war on terror” lasting over ten years.
Christian Caryl writes about the use of drones and other robotics, how they are changing the nature of warfare, and the moral and ethical questions their current use and potential abilities raise. Particularly chilling is a first-hand account by a drone operator in Nevada of his experience targeting drones for use in Afghanistan:
Even though home and wife are just a few minutes’ drive down the road from his battle station, the peculiar detachment of drone warfare does not necessarily insulate Martin from his actions. Predator attacks are extraordinarily precise, but the violence of war can never be fully tamed, and the most gripping scenes in the book document Martin’s emotions on the occasions when innocent civilians wander under his crosshairs in the seconds just before his Hellfire missile arrives on target. Allied bomber pilots in World War II killed millions of civilians but rarely had occasion to experience the results on the ground. Drone operators work with far greater accuracy, but the irony of the technology is that its operators can see their accidental victims—two little boys and their shattered bikes, in one especially heartrending case Martin describes—in excruciating detail.
Jonathan D. Fitzgerald also considers Brooks’ article, uses it in class, and confirms Smith’s conclusion (and this is at a “Christian college”). Fitzgerald, like Brooks, blames this moral relativism on individualism, and sees the same among students identified as Evangelicals or raised in megachurches.
Christian Smith, author of the study, answers the question as well.
My experience is that most youth would like to understand and believe in moral realism—that real moral facts exist in the universe that are not merely human constructions—but nobody has taught them how that is possible, how all the pieces can fit together in an intellectually coherent way.
The problem may not be a failure of families, institutions, and culture. Moral reasoning in a complex, globalized world, is difficult. I do think Copeland’s question is valid. I wonder whether earlier generations were better able to deal with a moral dilemma, or that they simply accepted rules as given and universal and given that the world, or the world they experienced was less complex, moral reasoning was easier. Distinguishing right from wrong is relatively simple when small communities, made up of relatives and friends, are providing the resources for moral reflection and the sanctions, too.
Unfortunately, it’s not just young adults who have difficulty with moral questions. Adults do as well, and so do so-called family values conservative Christian televangelists. Witness Pat Robertson. Here’s a takedown of his argument.
This week, I’ve been thinking about one particular aspect of urban ministry that is frustrating and challenging, but also offers interesting opportunities. Among the issues raised in the discussion over the St. Francis house development (previous blog posts here and here) are increased noise, traffic, congestion, parking difficulties and vandalism. None of these is unique to the block on which the proposed development will be built. Urban churches deal with them every day and few are as affected by them as Grace Church. Three of the last four Sundays have seen parking restrictions and re-routed traffic on the streets around the church. We have had noise (and smells) from the Taste of Madison on September 4, and on September 11, in addition to the nightmare of the Ironman Triathlon, there were 9-11 services at the Capitol during our 8:00 service.
Still, the opportunities outweigh the challenges. In spite of the fact that people had incredible difficulty arriving for our 5:00 interfaith service on 9-11, there were around 150 people in attendance. All of that foot traffic around the square for Taste of Madison or the Triathlon is free publicity for our church and an opportunity to tell our story (at no monetary expense) to passers-by. Our courtyard garden is an important part of our mission, ministry, and outreach. I received a letter this week from a neighbor who praised its beauty and the hard work of our volunteer gardeners.
I was intrigued by an essay by Richard Krawiec that explores the community created in urban settings. He argues that our random or regular encounters with people in the city create a certain kind of community:
In the city, community is created when the clerk who knows your face lets you take the sandwich, trusting you’ll be back tomorrow to pay. When the guy at the newspaper kiosk remembers your interest in the Red Sox and sums up last night’s game for you as he hands you the Boston Globe. When the owner of the small café invites you in after he has closed and personally cooks you something to eat.
It is a set of interactions, human behaviours that have meaning and expectations between its members. Not just action, but actions based on shared expectations, values, beliefs and meanings between individuals. Interdependent.
He contrasts that sort of community and those random encounters with suburbia. It is something I’ve noticed as well. We know our neighbors better in the year we’ve lived in our Madison home than we got to know in 5 years in a Greenville County subdivision. The complete essay is here: The Bearable Closeness of Being: Why Cities Create Community
There is a challenge that faces us, however. It is that many of our neighbors are students, who grew up in suburbia and may not realize that they are living in a community that includes people other than other students, and that living in such a community brings with it shared responsibility and some shared values. Each class needs to be educated about that, both by the university and by the larger community.
Bellah’s new book, Religion in Human Evolution, is just out. I’ve linked to an earlier interview here.
This interview with Nathan Schneider is well-worth reading; full of insight and food for thought. But there are two quotations that I especially like:
The academic world is one of the few places where prejudice is supposed to be totally banned, and we’re politically correct on everything, but it’s still a place where you can attack religion out of utter, complete, bottomless ignorance and not be considered to have done anything wrong. It’s astounding to me to hear what some people can say with the assumption that everyone would agree with them, based on nothing whatsoever.
Schneider asked about “Sheilaism,” first identified in Habits of the Heart, the phenomenon that Americans increasingly create spiritual and religious meaning for themselves, without connecting to community of any sort. Here’s the interchange:
NS: An important part of your message has been the famous concern expressed in Habits of the Heart about “Sheilaism”—the kind of individualistic spirituality that you and your colleagues saw at work in the United States. Some have suggested recently, including your former student Harvey Cox, that some of these nontraditional spiritualities are finding a place in social and political life in a way that wasn’t quite recognized before. Is the way you think about new kinds of spiritualities evolving?
RB: I certainly think that so-called spirituality can have social and even political consequences. I’ve seen this among environmental activists, who often have some kind of eco-spirituality and who are very organizationally loose. They switch from one group to another, and if one group isn’t pure enough they go to another. And yet they spend a long period of their lives doing good work in a cause. In the end what I feel is most problematic about “I’m spiritual but not religious” is: what the hell are you going to tell your children? I’m allergic to the notion that so-called institutional religion—by which people mean organizations such as churches and synagogues—is bad. Institutions are very important and if you think you can get along without them, you’re putting yourself on the wrong line; you can’t.
NS: So your conclusions in Habits of the Heart stand?
RB: If you think about what has happened in American society, or even just today with what is going on with the Tea Party movement, Habits of the Heart was so right on. Radical individualism is even more evident today than when Habits was published twenty-five years ago. It describes the default mode of this deeply misguided society beautifully—horribly, but beautifully.
Bellah’s cautions concerning “radical individualism” are borne out in this article from USA today: “More Americans tailoring religion to fit their needs.”
Preaching Grace on the Square 