Where Am I? The Middle-Class Crisis of Place

Craig Bartholomew says staying in one place is key to our spiritual and community health.

Craig Bartholomew, a philosophy professor at Redeemer University College in Ancaster, Ontario, has been at work on a curious topic. "When people ask what I'm working on, and I say, 'place,' I get a blank stare," Bartholomew says. But examples help. "The home is a place, the city is a place, the university is a place, the mall is a place, and the placial dynamic of all these places must be attended to for people to flourish."

To exist at all, we must be somewhere. And as embodied creatures, we are implaced in specific contexts. Yet in contemporary culture, this aspect of human existence is threatened by what Bartholomew calls a "crisis of place" created by several elements of our technological society. To fully flourish as human beings—and to flourish as entire communities—Bartholomew argues, we need to recover the lost art of placemaking.

On behalf of the City project, Halee Gray Scott recently interviewed Bartholomew about his work, Where Mortals Dwell: A Christian View of Place for Today, newly out from Baker Academic. Keep reading