Introduction: The City
Winter 2016
The City
City Stories of Nature and Grace: An Urban Pilgrim’s Progress
Philip Bess“A good culture of building almost certainly requires an understanding of man as an intermediate being: simultaneously part of, different from, and responsible for nature.”
Political Life and the Horizon of the Human: Polis, Church and State, and Totalitarianism
Mark Shiffman“We might say, in Aristotelian terms, that the political animal is prior in potency, but the city is prior in act.”
The Creation of the City of Man
Giorgio Buccellati“The biblical God is the city’s conditor because he created the conditions that made it possible, conditions which must continue to govern this human efflorescence that is the city, precisely if we want it to remain human.”
Flannery O’Connor and the City
Rodney Howsare“It seems that the cities in O’Connor’s stories are there precisely in order to alert us to something that concerns us all. The modern megalopolis, after all, is our invention and, as with all inventions, it tells us something about its inventors.”
The Conversation of Ascent: A Reading of St. Augustine’s Confessions, Book IX, Chapter 10
Scott Jude Roniger“For Augustine, language is social from start to finish, from its acquisition to its perfection.”
The City and Apostolic Solitude
Gilles François“[S]olitude becomes the principal catalyst of mission.”
Retrieving the Tradition
We, the Ordinary People of the Streets
Madeleine Delbrêl“Each tiny act is an extraordinary event, in which heaven is given to us, in which we are able to give heaven to others.”
God in the City
Madeleine Delbrêl“If we are responsible that men have lost God, then yes, we should perhaps suffer; but above all we should give them back God.”
Religion and the Life of Civilisation
Christopher Dawson“A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture.”
Notes & Comments
Jane Jacobs: “Who Is This Crazy Dame?”
Nicholas J. Healy Sr.