Theology in the Raw - What Is a "Theology of Place?" Dr. Ben Norquist and Dr. Brian Miller

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Dr. Ben Norquist is a writer, scholar, and serves as the Director of Communications & Development for Bethlehem Institute for Peace & Justice, bringing Palestinian Christian teaching into conversations within the global church. Dr. Brian Miller is a professor of sociology at Wheaton College, and his research interests include the American suburbs (particularly their development, culture, depictions in media, and housing), cities, religion and place and how it relates to American evangelicalism and culture. Together, Ben and Brian wrote a recent book together called: Every Somewhere Sacred: Rescuing a Theology of Place in the American ImaginationTime Stamps00:00 Introduction02:01 What is a Theology of Place? 06:56 Ethics and Place. 11:29 The Morality of Cities. Why do we build these places? 17:11 Patriotism, Christian Citizenship & Love of Place 23:54 Gentrification, NIMBYism & Who Is My Neighbor?30:33 What Theology of Place Is Trying to Recover34:40 Israel-Palestine Through the Lens of Land40:34 Christianity in the Big City vs. Rural Christianity and the Suburbs49:2 Where to Find More Brian and BenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

God loves Jerusalem in a certain way. God loves Dayton, Tennessee in a certain way. Don't ignore God's love for Dayton because Tim Keller is pointing out all the ways that God loves Manhattan. The unique value that this place offers to the world and the different value that this place offers to the world. So they're all in some ways mundane in the sense that they're just a part of the world that God made. And they are all in their own ways uniquely sacred. Hey friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology and Rha. My guests today are Dr. Bend Norr. He was a writer, scholar, and serves as the director of communications and development for Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice, bringing Palestinian Christian teaching into conversation with the global church. And Dr. Brian Miller is a professor of sociology at Wheaton College. And his research interests include the American suburbs, particularly their development, culture, depictions in media and housing. Also, cities, religion, and place, and how it relates to American evangelism and culture. Together, Ben and Brian wrote a really interesting book called Every Somewhere Sacred, rescuing a theology of place in the American imagination, which is what we talk about in this podcast

episode. So please welcome to the show. Welcome back to the show. The one and only Dr. Ben Norquist. And welcome to the show for the first time. The one and only Dr. Brian Miller. All right, Ben and Brian, welcome to Theology and Arras. Brian, welcome for the first time.

Ben, you've been on before. so good to have you guys on. And I would love to talk about a theology of place. You guys both have been doing a ton of thinking about this, writing about it. When people hear like a theology of creation, that resonates for most Christians, hopefully it should. Creation, fall, redemption. You know, if you've been to the church for a while, theology of creation, you kind of get it. Not that we live it all very well as evangelical American Christians, but we understand what it means.

But when you say like a theology of place, is there a difference between those two? And if so, what is a theology of place in relation to a theology of creation? Amazing. Preston, it's great to be back on. Really delighted to be back. And actually, we're very sensitive to the fact that some of the things that we think about when we think about theology of place are thought about, like pieces of it are thought about in different silos. or different communities of conversation, like the theology of creation people over here, and like urban theology over here. And, you know, like Wendell Berry disciples over here, like there are these different kinds of conversations that are circling around

and that all contributing to, but that we try to kind of combine in our own thinking when we think about this thing that we call theology of place. And it certainly speaks to land and the natural world. You know, like the physical domain that Christians who are sensitive to environmental issues, for example, care a lot about. There are natural places all over the world that God cares about. But that's not the whole physical world, right? There's also the built world. There are cities and buildings and infrastructure. and coffee shops and church buildings and like all of the like the places that humans inhabit

that might not get the kind of attention in conversations about the environment or if they are conversations among like theology of environment theology of creation kinds of conversations they're really just kind of set as a counterpoint and not not treated as a part the subject matter itself. So when we talk about theology of place, we're really asking these questions about how does God relate to? What is in God's heart for? And maybe what should be in our heart and mind for different, like a whole range of different kinds of places and how those places relate to each other. How does the natural world and the built world relate to each other? how do different kinds of built world relate to each other?

And how can we as Christians be inhabiting these spaces and talking about them in ways that help us really live into our own vocation to follow Jesus closely through these places, in these places, and to love as neighbors the people who live in them? theology of creation, when I hear theology of creation, I typically think of like the broad view of the natural world. I don't really think about the built world as much. And maybe I should. Maybe theology of creation includes both. That's just kind of what pops into my head. But theology of place seems to really intertwine those two. Would that be correct? I'm still trying to tease out if there's a difference between theology of creation, theology of place or is theology of place just a specific portion of creation that we're talking about. I think you're right that they're certainly related. And thank you for having us here today.

It's great to have a conversation about these topics. Our sense was as we were growing up in Christian churches, as we've been in Christian colleges, that underlying sense of creation or the material world mattering is really important, right? I don't know if you can get to a theology of place without having a sense of what God has created physically, right? Not just our souls, not just our thinking, not just our hearts. But the physical stuff, which includes our bodies and everything around us and the built environment is important. God cares about that. God has a plan for that. And there is an established body of work in what you might call a theology of place literature that goes back now a couple decades. So we're not, we're new relatively to this conversation,

and drawing upon a number of other thinkers. One of the ones that was particularly influential to me was Walter Brugman's book, The Land, which came out in the 1970s, where he makes the argument that to understand scripture and God's story, you have to think about land. And that was not my experience growing up, right? The actual physical land and property and material things was at least secondary, if not even consequential, really at all, right? So to start thinking about not just those broader categories, oh, I have to take this

seriously, but then I'm also put in a place. God has put me here, called me here. If it's Wheaton, if it's a city, it's a rural area. There are particular things that I need to pay attention to and ways that I need to live into that world. When I think a place, my default is it's just neutral, like morally neutral, the buildings, the streets, or even, you know, I guess when you get into natural creation, it's a little bit more like, wow, this shows off God's glory, the mountain peak, and this is, you know, so it's so. It's so. It's so. It's, you know, it's, not like a moral category, but it's a little more theological. Again, I'm just speaking how I intuitively kind of reflect on these things. But when I get to the built world, it just seems like

what would like an ethic of place even be? Like that just doesn't naturally roll off of my theological brain. So help us think through. Like what are the questions we should be asking as we think of like a theology of place or even as it applies to even ethics? One of the questions that we have thought a lot about is who is at home in this place and why is that the case. And it's not just about history. There are ways in which the way that we tell stories and construct ideas about particular places carries assumptions about who belongs there. And it quickly, like when you add those kinds of questions in, they quickly become very ethical questions.

Biblically speaking, we spend a good bit of time in our thinking in Genesis and look at what happens with place and where people live and abide. As these different series of judgments are handed down in the early chapters of the book, one of the, one of the key. consequences of sin has to do with place. It has to do with where a person gets to live. In that kind of formulation, the fall comes with a consequence of expulsion from a place, out, out of that place. And then that kind of like pattern of expulsion continues, right? with when Cain murders Abel, he is cast further out into a land of wandering. So there's this place-based consequences. So there's this kind of ethical dimensions to place that we see very early on.

And then in response to that, we see people starting to build. So like there's this built world theme in the early chapters of Genesis that have moral and ethical overtones, right? You know, when when God seeks to provide protection to Cain, Cain is afraid that he's going to become victim of the very thing that he was guilty, right, of being murdered. And God provides for that. He's going to protect him so that no one murders him and, you know, in return. And Cain goes out and takes his own safety into his own hands. So you can kind of read that text as him saying,

that's not good enough, God. I'm going to take my own protection of my own hands. And then we see one of the very first depictions of the beginning of the built world. He builds a city. Right. And then there's this city building theme that's not good. Like the valence of it in those chapters is people are building a world for themselves. And it culminates with Babel.

you know kind of the ultimate depiction of a of a of a city that is unto ourselves the very ethical dimensions and i don't know if your viewers will be able to see this if they're not listening but this is this is so i have tattoos on my arms i'll just explain this for people listening i have tattoos on my arms and uh this is a tattoo of the tower of babel then and now so like the base of it is a kind of traditional depiction of the tower. And then sitting on top of it is a modern skyscraper. And the kind of insight here is that we're still at it. Like we still seek to build Babel. We still seek to take our own security, our own provision into our own hands. And that comes through sometimes in the way that we build built places. Yeah. So when when Kane goes

builds a city and and then you have babble a few chapters later. Like is it making a moral claim on cities or the motivation for building cities? Or what is the moral lens through which we should read the city in those early parts of Genesis and how it applies to today?

I think certainly at a level of motivation. Yes. So it should, at the very least, cause us to ask, why are we building these places and to be kind of soul-searching about it? You know, to have a, I guess, a kind of moral skepticism, a basic moral skepticism about the motivations underneath these places. But two, just, you know, living in the world, we can see that places do get built for some people and not for others. which, you know, as soon as you add that human dimension in, there's an ethical component. So I'd be curious, too.

So Brian's a sociologist of the suburbs. You know, he thinks all day about these kinds of things. So from a sociological standpoint, Brian, how you would kind of see interact with this question. I appreciated, Ben, that you mentioned this idea of home, because one of the things we build up to in our writing is we actually find there might be at least four themes throughout scripture of how we can view places and land and creation. So home is one, right? So the earth is not just human home, creation home. It's God's home, actually, right? God's the maker of it. God welcomes people there. The end of the biblical story is God returns back to earth and dwells with his people.

But we also found other themes that other theologians and Christian communities have thought about that I found particularly helpful. Like, what if land is a gift or a blessing? That's Brugamon's argument that as he's making a covenant with Abraham and his descendants and God's people, land is part of that. But the land is not meant just for them. The land is meant to be a blessing to all peoples. It's not meant to be hoarded, exploited, used, extracted from.

It's meant to extend God's giving it to them. And then they are to steward it, to use it, to gift it. to others as well. And we have two other themes as well. Another one was a theme of sacrament, that land in place could be sacramental. And another one learning from native scholars is land as kin, right? So instead of seeing ourselves above creation, which we often fall into the habit of doing, is that we are also created. So animals, plants, land are also created. And together, all the created order gives glory to God

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which I rarely write down questions ahead of time, but as I was reflecting on this topic and the book you guys wrote everywhere, somewhere sacred, it made me think about what is the balance between place being home, place being sacred, place being something you're proud of, it's part of your identity. What's the difference between having that perspective versus, or is it versus patriotism? You know, because I, yeah, I mean, does that mean that we, you know, we should be super like, I could just see where it could fall into almost like unhealthy. nationalism or an unhealthy, you know, patriotism is a broad word, but let's just say unhealthy forms of patriotism. What's the difference between loving and finding your identity in place

versus, yeah, an unhealthy form of nationalism? You're reminding me right now. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead, Brian. It was reminding me of two points that we make towards the end of the book of if we need this better imagination, right? So we struggle with these questions or maybe we haven't thought about these issues before. How do we tell those better, more honest stories of what actually happened, but that also speak to this Christian vision of what land and place could be for all people? How do we live out those stories so that it's a blessing to us and others and not just for a small group or people who happen to be in power? we don't come out in the end and say there are particular things you must do

but there are lots of things that Christians and others could do to extend the blessings of land in place to anchor themselves somewhere without saying no this is just for me and people that I care about right to extend that to everyone who's there and people who may not be there right who are displaced or they want to welcome in James Baldwin who said you know, I reserve the right because of my love for my country to criticize my country. And, you know, so I think it's good to ask the question, you know, if we think of ourselves as patriots or, you know, that we're good citizens or whatever, what does that relationship mean to us, especially as people whose ultimate loyalty is to a higher power, is to God, you know,

the king of all nations. And so, yeah, what is good to citizenship? Is it unquestioning alignment? Right. With, you know, what the country does in all cases, or is it something more nuanced than that? And of course, the answer to that is more nuanced than that, you know. So, yeah. And these are.

I was wondering if it's just. Separating, you know, place, even built place, natural place, versus like, government or people in power who are ruling over the place. Like, to me, that's, I think it's a, I think it's a fairly easy distinction to make in my mind. Like, you could love, absolutely love and adore and never want to leave the land now called the United States of America. And you could also be an anarchist and just you can't stand the people in power. and critique them. I'm not saying that's necessarily my perspective. Yeah, but to me it's like we both can be true at the same time, right?

Loving the land and not really celebrating the people ruling over that land and how they've gone about making up laws and rules about how to live in the land. Is that an easy distinction to make? Is that a third distinction? Yeah, I think, of course. I mean, you know, like we all have different, I would say it's like different unique relationships with our local community and with the other kind of like concentric circles of the ways that we see ourselves as a part of these places like you know in some

situations i think of myself as from illinois you know and i think of myself as a midwesterner i think of myself as an american by which i mean i should clarify a citizen of the united states but like all of those things, oh, I just lost my thought. What were we talking about? Do you want to pick up the thread? As you were thinking about sort of those different layers of either belonging or identity been, you know, linked to place. I also think there's, there's room and freedom for people to act in those different arenas. Not necessarily everyone is going to be acting at the national level and be able to influence those kinds of policies or actions, though we should care about it. We should pay attention. Other people act at very local levels

in their community, people around them, their congregations, all that's needed among Christians, right, as opposed to like, no, focus all your attention at get the national policies exactly, right, and everything will follow from it. I'm not sure about that, right? Because then there's still questions about local communities, Ben, or regional identities, right, or a state or a community. all those are true of us at the same time, and yet we can't each of us tackle all of those. Yeah. So just to finish the thought, too, it was, you know, that those places are distinct in our minds from the government, from our current administration, you know, which cycles in and out. But I think the other, a couple of other things that are important here is that we can and should. I think make connections between places and people.

So, you know, we're talking about the connection right now between place and government, but rarely do we ever really think of places minus people. There's the stories we tell about the places around us always implicate and involve our imagination about who's there. and who belongs there and those kinds of things too. And that is an arena that I think is rich for Christian ethical considerations. I've questioned kind of related to that. It's actually related to something you said kind of a passing before about place being somebody's home. Obviously, if you go and take somebody's home to do something unjust, that's, we can all say that's immoral.

what about and here this is going to get a little spicy maybe on a on a racial or even political level because I can see different perspectives kind of saying the same thing and maybe I'm missing something like like if a bunch of white people move into an urban center that's predominantly not white we call that you know maybe gentrification or you know people could say gosh this is their place this is their home and now you're kind of interrupting the way they've made that place a home. You're bringing in, you know, your whiteness. Maybe you're bringing in, maybe there's an economic disruption, maybe. And I could see where somebody would say, well, just like, I'm not saying that's immoral necessarily, but like, like, that's at least, like, consider, like, the impact you're having on the place that people call home. On the flip side, I could see people probably on a different political end.

say almost the exact same thing about non-white people moving into, say, a suburb that's predominantly white. Well, this is kind of they have a way of doing things here. And they have, they've made this a home. And it is kind of related to the ethnic makeup. And you bring in a bunch of people who aren't part of that. And it's going to, it's, you can almost say the same thing. Are these two sides of the same coin? Or are they different perspectives? Or am I missing something altogether? I think the key would be thinking about who has the power, the resources, the voice, and the ability to shape what happens to those places over time. So it's probably unrealistic for us to expect that places will stay the same. That's not what happens when humans interact with either the built environment or nature.

Humans do things. Places change. They have layers. They have histories. We talk a little bit about the sort of metaphor of like, copying, pasting, or rewriting or remixing, right? Any of our places have those kinds of layers. But particularly important for Christians to think about is who's determining that, right?

Which of those stories then get told? Who's making those decisions? If we're using the home metaphor, yeah, whose home is it? Who's welcoming? Who's hospitable? Whose place is it? I think we should always be asking those questions. Yeah. Ben, any thoughts on that? Remind me the question.

Just the different environments, whether it's an urban center or suburb, suburb area, has a particular ethnic makeup when a different group of people who are not of that place, but not moving in and disrupting the home aspect of this place. Yeah, is that? Yeah, I think it's important as Christians for us to ask what, you know, what can we learn from the Bible about this? And one, you know, I think one key resource would be Jesus teachings about neighbor, who is our neighbor. And are there narratives that are coming to us that are anti or that resist Jesus? what Jesus tells us about who our neighbor is.

And if there are, then we need to be really skeptical of those, even if they align with our politics. You know, in some ways, we can kind of array the political options in our world today based on how you answer that question, who is our neighbor. And what do they deserve from us? What do we owe them? What do we owe our neighbors? and Jesus, I think, is really, really challenging to the traditional answers that our political

options give us, you know, in issues that we all talk about and think about a lot, like migration and housing and those kinds of things. And this gets really practical, and for a lot of people, being faithful to Jesus' teachings will probably result in discomfort. Social discomfort, maybe economic discomfort, you know, there's like a not in my, what is it, not in my backyard kind of phenomenon

that comes through in a lot of places, like a lot of well-to-do places in this world. And if you're a Christian living in those places and your impulse towards, you know, a homeless shelter that wants to open up in your neighborhood or a drug treatment facility that wants to open up in your neighborhood which is an actual story that we tell in the book or you know any number of like or the homeless guy on the street or whatever is I love you Jesus teaches me to but but please be somewhere else is I think there are some you know I think Jesus has something to tell you

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Love it. rescuing a theology of place from the American imagination. What is, what do you, help us understand what you are rescuing in, in the book. Totally. Yeah. So the title, there's one, one word that I want to correct there. It's not from, it's in. So it's rescuing a theology of place.

Sorry. Oh, that's a big difference. That's a huge difference. And it does make a big difference in the American imagination. And yeah, I mean, the book and the conversations Brian and I have been having revolve a lot around this idea of land stories. We talked, we introduced this idea early in the book. And then that comes up throughout the book, land stories. Land stories are what comes into our head when we think about places.

So when you think about like, I'm from the Midwest, I grew up with my community. holding and retelling in various ways a land story about Appalachia. Just, you know, for example. So certain things come into my head when I think of Appalachia, whether I've ever been there or not. And the things that come into our heads, this is like the world that we construct in our heads. It's our imagination. and our imagination as Americans about different kinds of places, both within the United States and all around the world, have ethical implications. You know, they might tell the truth about places or they might actually lie about places in some ways.

And like thinking about Palestine, for example, I've been there many times. I work for the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice and, you know, report to Palestinian Christians. and so I have a lot of exposure to reality that does not match in large part the imagination, like what comes into the imagination of a lot of Americans when I say the word Palestine. And what comes into the imaginations of people whose position in the world makes them influential,

whether they know it or not. You know, they generate a lot of wealth and taxes come off of that to the U.S. government, and then those taxes get used, deployed in the world in ways that can benefit some and harm others. That's just one way that the imagination of an American is actually really, it's like very important to think carefully about. So when we say rescuing a theology of place in the American imagination,

You know, we've had this long history in the United States that has resulted in the kind of formation of a particular way of thinking about land and place and people and who belongs in certain places and what certain places are like and other places, etc. That has really important ethical significance that we need to think about carefully as followers of Jesus. So theology of place in the American imagination. That's where that comes from. Yeah. And if I come back to Preston in your previous question, you had come back to the theme of home, right? So whose home is it among people? But if we're thinking about those American land stories, we tend to think of home as like private property, right? So if I own it and I, and then I can do whatever I want with it, right? I can exclude people. I can exploit the land. I can do what I want. But if land and place is God's home, first of all, that should point us towards other. stories than sort of drawing Edward and saying, no, this is my land, I can do with it what I want. No, if it's God's home or God's gift meant to be a blessing to others, then we should be telling other kinds of stories and acting into those stories.

That's good. That's good. I'm curious, yeah, going back to your experience in Palestine, I remember when I first understood the significance of land as it pertains to displacement, ethnic cleansing, and in the whole Israel-Palestine conflict. To me, that was so eye-opening and so huge, that people try to make it about, like, a religious tension. I would love your thoughts on this. To me, I'm like, I don't, there's that, there's some of that.

But I think it's, I think it primarily comes down to issues revolving land. I mean, yeah. For sure. So Palestine, you know, before Israel was established in 1948, Palestine was a district, you know, it was a place that people lived. And the people who lived there included Muslims, Christians, and Jews. And they lived there in, you know, maybe in some cases, like distinct communities, but not warring with each other, not one group dominating another group. There was a kind of social fabric that was diverse. That is very different now, but it's not because

of religion. We know that because they were living together in peace prior to 1948. What changed? Ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing happened. A group came in, and decided, now this is an exclusive space. It is a place and space-based issue and said the roots that eat this group over here have in this land, we don't recognize them. In fact, we're going to sever them and push you out to make room for others to grow their roots in this land.

That's what happened in 1948, 1949. and then, you know, the ref, and that's why, like, being a refugee certainly is like an important component of this picture. That is a place-based status, too, isn't it? That is an identity based on, I am not where my home is. And this issue has a lot of refugees involved. You know, refugees from 1948, refugees from 1967. People continue being displaced. You know, right now, settlers, Israeli settlers in the West Bank are pushing, pushing, pushing, applying violence as needed to get their way, to clear out additional Palestinian communities from places they've lived for hundreds of years in the West Bank. My own boss at BIPJ, Tony Dyck, is, he's from Bethlehem.

That's where his family is and so on and so forth. he lives in Bolivia now because of policies of the state of Israel that are related to like marrying someone from not Palestine he married someone who's not from Palestine and so now he's displaced

so he cannot live there he cannot go back home with his wife correct that's insane that's crazy so yeah all that to say you know it's

it's related to ethnic cleansing. Like it goes back to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. And so what we think of as a conflict is not ancient. Right. You know, what we're watching now is not just the most modern version of something that's been going on for thousands of years. Like might be part of the American imagination about that place.

There are other factors that are involved and they relate closely to land and place. Right. Right. And even today, I mean, you're the expert in cities like Haifa or even in, I mean, Haifa, you have Jews and Muslims getting along differently than better, a lot better than people might expect maybe elsewhere in the land. Or you have Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims in the West Bank who. Indeed. Again, maybe they've lived together for thousands of years. Yep. Yeah. And they get along pretty well from what I understand.

At least I only talked to Palestinian Christians, and they said, yeah, that's not. That's not. Attention is not with fellow. Yeah. Palestinian society. There are distinctive religious communities, you know, multiple kinds of, I mean, kinds, categories of Palestinian Christians, different traditions, multiple traditions of Palestinian Muslims.

Before 1948, Palestinian Jews. And the most salient problem in their lives is a shared problem. It's a problem that they face together, which is the occupation. Yeah, so some people will come in and try to make it about religion and drive a wedge between Palestinian Christians and their Muslim neighbors. and the Palestinian Christians I know won't have it. Yeah. Let's bring it back to, and we're coming up on the hour,

but coming back to the American, the United States context, I guess it's not limited to this context. And it's more of a general question. I often encounter kind of two different perspectives on place. and I mentioned this to you offline. You have the nature, the Wendell Berry, who's the Montana pastor that passed away. Eugene Peterson.

Eugene Peterson ended up there on the lake in Montefat. You know, they talk so, he's great. They talk so brilliantly on just being away from the city, being in nature, going on long walks in the woods and looking at birds and clouds and, you know,

taking it easy. and not being in the hustle and bustle of the city. And I don't know enough about Barry or Peterson to know whether they said this is what everybody should do. But they talk about it in a way that's like pretty attractive, you know. And then you have the urban ministry people. I remember taking an urban ministry class in college. And again, didn't quite say it,

but there's kind of like this air of like, if you're not doing urban ministry, you kind of like don't really get like oh that's cute you have your little suburban church and do your sermons you know but like there's real needs over here you know like or even maybe tim keller you know again i don't know enough of his works to say if he built a theology around the city that would say go to the city and don't live in the country anyway are these incompatible is one right one's wrong. How should I think about these two kind of perspectives? I would start with, I appreciate that there's Christians advocating for and thinking about each of those different kinds of

places. I don't think in the Christian faith, we'd want people to be placeless or to not be rooted in their setting so much that their heads sort of in the sky or heaven is the only goal, some of these descriptions we might have. The one you left out of the category is is actually the suburbs, which is where the majority of Americans live by quite a bit. There's a lot more people in these suburban settings, which historically were meant to try to bring together some of those things from the city and some of those things from nature.

And through a series of policies and decisions and stories, this is what Americans have largely settled on. Are these suburban settings that do a little, of both, critics would say they do neither. Right. Well, that's, I'll fit your suburbs in more of a negative connotation. Like it's like, you don't have the art or ingenuity of the city and yet you're not really in the country. You're just kind of hiding out in your suburbs. You drive home, park your car, shut the garage door, cut yourself off and enjoy your nice little cushy padded life, your nerfy suburban. Right. I don't know. I said for my, what I'm usually with the term sub,

it's kind of the word boomer. Like it's kind of turned in almost like a slur, you know, like his suburban churches or whatever. But yeah, is there is there a place for the suburb or is it just the ugly stepchild of place? I'm living here. Ben's living here. I don't. I kind of am. I think the question, like, I've thought about this because I grew up, I kind of came of age and I was in college at Tim Keller's heyday. But I went to college and then worked at that same college in a small town in rural Tennessee in a very poor county, you know. And so subtly, I kind of started noticing, wow, when I hear Tim Keller, I start to feel jealous. I start to feel like he's, he's implying to me that God is actually more in Manhattan than he is in Dayton, Tennessee. And I don't think that

that's okay. Okay. So I think that the question to ask is, you know, these kind of schools of thought, you know, that they gather disciples, you know, and what did, what does the New Testament warn us about like, oh, I'm of Peter, I'm of Tim Keller, I'm of, I'm of, I'm of Wendell Berry, you know, no, no, we're of the creator of all of those spaces. And the question that I've kind of settled on for myself as a kind of diagnostic is, as I'm hearing, as I'm reading Wendell Berry, who offers so much value to us, and as I'm reading Tim Keller and these other people. Am I subtly

getting the idea that God himself is using these space, these words where I live as a slur. So like when God, if I'm standing before God and I, and he says, where did you live? And I tell him the suburbs, what do I think comes into his heart, even if he doesn't say it?

You know, that's, and that's, that is kind of what we mean by American imagination. Like, there is so much that the American imagination holds over us that I think we can step back from, you know, with guidance from Jesus and look at and ask, is that right? Is that right? Is that right? There's opportunity for us to rescue that theology of place in the American. So there is no place that intrinsically is like better than, higher than where everybody should be. We should celebrate the diversity. There's pros and cons. There's ethical challenges with every kind of place. Yeah, but I guess I would say there's differences between places, though.

Okay. So, but don't impose a single hierarchy of value over all places. God loves Jerusalem. in a certain way. God loves Dayton, Tennessee in a certain way. Don't ignore God's love for Dayton because, you know, Tim Keller is pointing out all the ways that God loves Manhattan.

So a very rich and very topography, you know, that kind of highlights the unique value that this place offers to the world and that this, and the different value that this place offers to the world. But they're all, so they're all in some ways mundane in the sense that they're part of a world, they're just a part of the worlds that God made.

And they are all in their own ways uniquely sacred. Could some be further reflect, be further from the heart of God? I apologize to my listeners in these two cities that they just came to my head, send me your email and complaint. But I'm thinking like Vegas or Orlando. Like, Vegas is like, you know, the obvious. But even Orlando, it's like this, you know, whatever. I've got a good friend, really good friend who lives in Orlando.

He loves it. I've been to Orlando. I love it. But, you know, it's just kind of, yeah, I don't know. Disney World all over the place. Maybe another way to think about it. And one that I've found excites my own imagination and sometimes helps students as well is thinking about from whatever setting you are from, wherever you might

consider home, what would it look like if it was fully restored by God? If it was truly what it was created to be from the beginning, which we get glimpses of throughout the biblical story. So if in the American land story, a suburb I live in like Wheaton looks like the American dream, right? It's relatively prosperous, well off, and so on. How much better would it be and how different would it be if it was fully realized as part of God's kingdom? Even though there's plenty of Christians here, plenty of churches, plenty of Christians organizations, Orlando is the center of Christian organizations as well, right?

But what if it was what it could fully be, what God intended for people and creation to be together? And I have a hard time picturing that, right? It's hard to imagine what would go away, what would be the same? Would I, you know, would my daily life look like? But it gives me some sense. Vegas, Vegas would probably lose a lot of buildings.

But it helps reorient me away from just what I'm used to in these narratives I have to remember that God's got different plans and narratives for us. And we may not know exactly what they are, but it will be something better than what's around me now or what's available in Vegas or what's in Dayton, Tennessee right now. Yeah, yeah, that's good. Well, hey, you guys, thanks so much for coming out on Theology Row. Again, the book is everywhere, somewhere sacred, rescuing a theology place in the American imagination. people to check it out. Where can people find you and your work? Obviously the book, check it out, Amazon or wherever you buy your books.

But yeah, if people want to get a hold of you or just look up more about both you guys, where do they go? For me, the Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice has a substack. I write for that substack on occasion alongside our Palestinian brothers and sisters. Cool. Awesome. Yeah. And I teach at Wheaton College, so I've got a faculty page there. I also blog on many matters suburban at legally sociable.com of things I see around me. Oh, right on. Sweet. Thanks you guys. Appreciate it.

Thanks, Preston.