Table Of ContentReligion and Community in
the New Urban America
Religion and
Community in
the New Urban
America
z
PAUL D. NUMRICH
AND
ELFRIEDE WEDAM
1
3
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From both authors: In memory of the late Director of the Religion
in Urban America Program, Lowell W. Livezey (1943–2007), to
whom we owe so much.
From Numrich: For Christine, who has explored some of the
world’s great cities with me.
From Wedam: For my immigrant parents, whose urban
experiences shaped the next generation.
Contents
Foreword by Martin D. Stringer ix
Preface and Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: The New Urban Era and the Religion Factor 1
PART I: Theoretical and Conceptual Framework
1. Adding Religion to Chicago’s Story 17
2. Community and Congregations in the New Metropolis 35
PART II: Congregational Case Studies
3. Neighborhood Parishes and Churches in a Restructuring City 61
4. Area Mosques and Diverse Corridors 104
5. Area Congregations in the City 139
6. Area Congregations in a Suburban Boom Town 177
7. Metro Congregations: A Wider View of the Restructuring
Metropolis 217
viii Contents
PART III: Religion’s Urban Significance: Chicago and Beyond
8. Congregations and Change: Interpreting Religion’s
Significance in the New Metropolis 255
Afterword: A Case for Representativeness 283
Appendix A: Research Methods 289
Appendix B: Questionnaire 293
Appendix C: Field Notes on Worship Services 295
Appendix D: Protocol for In-Depth Study of Religious Congregations 299
Notes 307
Bibliography 311
Index 341
Foreword
ChiCago has been the primary focus for the study of the city for just
short of a hundred years. Through that time many individuals and teams,
from many different disciplines, have focused on the structures of the city,
on the lives of its inhabitants, and on the way in which the people impact on
the city and the city impacts on its people. From the very start Robert Park
emphasized the need to focus both on the “ecology” of the city, its social
and physical structures, and on the “moral order” of the urban community.
For many in sociology, history, urban studies, and urban planning, the first
of these has predominated over the second. In focusing, once again, on
Chicago, and in this case taking into account the wider metropolis, Elfriede
Wedam and Paul Numrich have attempted to redress the balance. They
explore the relationship between religion and the city, both historically in
the academic literature, and more significantly on the ground in various
neighborhoods, suburbs, and intersections within the metropolis.
This book has grown out of the work of the Religion in Urban America
Program that was established by Lowell Livezey in Chicago in the early
1990s. I have been privileged and honored to play a very small part in the
development of that project and to provide an international comparator
in my own work in the British city of Birmingham. Over those twenty
years we have witnessed a paradigm shift in the study of the city, and in
the study of religion. In urban studies the focus has moved to the “global
city,” “transnationalism,” “globalization” in one direction, and to the rec-
ognition of diversity, multiculturalism and, more recently, superdiversity
in the other. In terms of religion, academic concerns have moved away
from a focus on the world religions, secularization, and on Europe and
the United States to more emphasis on everyday, or lived, religion, reli-
gious diversity, and the interaction between the secular and the religious.
In this text we see both these paradigm shifts in action as Wedam and
Numrich draw on an extensive range of theory, in both urban studies
