Enlightened Hearts, Warmed Intellects: City Challenges and Opportunities and North Park Possibilities

“Among the many events marking President Surridge’s inauguration was an academic symposium, held February 13, 2019. The symposium lecture was offered by Kathryn J. Edin, professor of sociology and public affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University—as well as North Park alumna and current trustee. In ‘Enlightened Hearts, Warmed Intellects: City Challenges and Opportunities and North Park Possibilities,’ Edin surveys the triumphs and tragedies of the city, not-ing that by 2050, two-thirds of the world population will likely live in urban areas. Drawing on her extensive research on the effects of hyper-segregation and benefits of its mitigation, Edin notes the opportunity before North Park University, given its location in the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in Chicago. As she concludes, ‘in one of the most segregated cities in the nation, in the most economically segregated time in our history as a nation this, in itself, is the kingdom of God, the New Jerusalem, breaking through.’ Three respondents offered comments on Edin’s lecture, two of which provided their responses for publication here: Michelle A. Clifton-Soderstrom, professor of theology and ethics at North Park Seminary, and Rich Kohng, director of civic engagement for the University’s Catalyst Hub.”¹Hauna Ondrey, “Comment,” The Covenant Quarterly 77.1, Chicago: Covenant Publications, 2019.

In 1950, about 30 percent of the world’s population was urban. By around 2008 that figure surpassed 50 percent. Last year, 55 percent of the world’s population lived in cities, and by 2050 about two-thirds of all citizens across the globe will live in cities. The twentieth century has been called “the Urban Century.” What then of the twenty-first century? It is an age in which everywhere, all across the globe the influence of the city will be felt.

In his book Triumph of the City, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser heralds the city as our species’ greatest invention.²Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin Press, 2011). He shows how the city lifted human achievements to heights that would not have been possible without urbanization. This is believable. Cities are our seats of government. Cities are the locations of our great cultural institutions. Most institutions of higher learning are in cities, and many of the marvels of modern architecture are in cities as well. Industrialization was key in the history of cities because it transformed them from edifices of protection, safety, and controlling routes of transportation and trade to places that concentrated capital and labor in amazing ways that allowed for unparalleled opportunities for economic growth.

But the industrializing city was also a magnet for poor immigrants from Europe and migrants from other parts of the United States. Some of these immigrants were pushed by crop failures and poor harvests, such as my ancestors from Sweden. Others by untenable social conditions, which prompted scores of African American migrants to move north during the Great Migration to what was thought of as “the promised land.” Still others by revolution and the pull of industrial jobs, as was the case for scores of Mexicans and, later, Mexican Americans, as Chicago drew them east.

Early twentieth-century sociologist Ernest Burgess observed this massive influx of immigrants coming into the city of Chicago at the turn of the century.³Ernest W. Burgess, “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project,” in Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925). He described how the city metabolized cascades of newcomers, perniciously and persistently segregating them by race and ethnicity—the Italians to Little Italy, the Germans to Deutschland, the Chinese to Chinatown, and the African Americans increasingly to the corridor along State Street that became known as the “Black Belt.”

The city also segregated newcomers and old-timers by income. Closest to the city center were the poorest citizens, who were relegated to what Burgess called the “ghetto,” the “underworld,” or the “roomers” districts. Those a little bit better off moved outward to claim the two-flats, and those who were even better off the bungalows and single-family homes. As Harvey Zorbaugh, one of the founders of the Chicago School of Sociology, observed in 1929 in his book The Gold Coast and the Slum, the Loop contained the central business district but also the most affluent residents of the city, hence the name the “Gold Coast.” But this gold coast lay cheek to jowl with the slum.⁴Harvey Warren Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929).

What the work of these early urban sociologists hinted at was a deep tragedy that, despite Glaeser’s prose, has proven to be as endemic to cities as their triumphs. Industrial cities—and now post-industrial cities—which by their nature attract unparalleled diversity, are often deeply segregated by ethnicity, by race, and by class. Chicago has been a poster child for these trends. Early industrialized cities often oppressed their workers and relegated them to squalid living conditions. Thus, one feature of industrialized cities is that they are often the scenes of intense class conflict, such as the 1886 Chicago Haymarket Riot, one of the most important riots in labor history. Racial conflict has also been endemic to cities, such as the Chicago race riot of 1919, the worst of the “red summer” riots that erupted across the country that year. In Chicago, thirty-eight people died and more than 500 were injured—sparked when an African American boy swimming in Lake Michigan accidentally drifted into an area informally designated whites only and was assaulted with rocks until he drowned. Student-led protest movements are also features of industrialized cities, such as those opposing the Vietnam War that disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention held in Chicago.

Thus, by the mid-twentieth century, the work of urbanists reflected both the triumph and tragedy of growing industrial cities. Perhaps the best-known, Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, found real hope in the diversity of the cities,⁵Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). while Lewis Mumford believed that cities were doomed if they did not begin to find a way to organize themselves around the needs of people rather than machines.⁶Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1961). Our provost’s book, Market Cities, People Cities, tells the story of cities that have organized themselves around human needs: “‘Market cities’ end up with higher social inequality and more segregation and higher crime than ‘people cities.’…People cities have higher trust among their people and more civic participation than market cities.”⁷Michael Oluf Emerson and Kevin T. Smiley, Market Cities, People Cities: The Shape of Our Urban Future (New York: NYU Press, 2018), 158.

When I was a graduate student, I became captivated by the work of French sociologist and sometime theologian Jacques Ellul. One of Ellul’s master works, The Meaning of the City, not only captured this tension—the triumph and tragedy of the city—better than any other, but it also offered a biblical diagnosis of the problem and a prophetic cure. The book has what is perhaps the best first sentence of any work of urban sociology I’ve read: “The first builder of a city was Cain. The circumstances were these….”⁸Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 1.

What were these circumstances? According to Scripture, recounts Ellul, Cain built the first city after he murdered his brother and was cast out, cursed to wander. But he was marked with the symbol of God’s protection, and he was promised that God would offer him safety and security. Yet Cain chose to go his own way, and instead of relying on God’s promise of security, he created his own by building the first city. The city was a sign of Cain’s rebellion. In keeping with this, Ellul reminds us that the famous early cities—Babel, Babylon, Nineveh—were all known for their rebellion.

I felt the tragedy of the city viscerally when I first came to Chicago in 1980, as a North Park freshman. North Park had just decided to stay in the city. Imagine what its president and board members must have felt when, in March 1981, there was a series of violent incidents on the North Side of Chicago in the Cabrini Green area. The violence was so severe that thirty-seven people had been shot and eleven had died. Jane Byrne, the first woman mayor of a major US city, made international headlines when she moved into the city’s most notorious public housing project, Cabrini Green, with her husband. She lasted only three weeks.

The 1980 census revealed something extraordinary: an historically high and rapidly growing trend—the growth of concentrated poverty, defined as neighborhoods in which at least 40 percent of neighbors are poor. The work of sociologist William J. Wilson showed a dramatic increase from the 1970s in the number of neighborhoods that were extremely poor; one’s probability of being poor and living in a hyper-segregated neighborhood had increased dramatically. Wilson argued that rising extreme segregation by income, layered on the historical pattern of racial segregation, helps explain why the War on Poverty had not been won.⁹William J. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

These hyper-segregated neighborhoods did not arise by accident. The Chicago Housing Authority sited massive public housing high-rises inside the historic Black Belt, closed off from the rest of the city by the Dan Ryan expressway and other barriers—physical and legal, such as restrictive housing covenants. On the South Side, the Robert Taylor Homes, completed in 1962, quickly became corridors of poverty and despair.

In 1982, facilitated by North Park sociology professor David Claerbaut, I began an internship in the neighborhood surrounding Cabrini Green. There I met April, an elementary-school student tutored after school by North Park students. Through April I met her mother, Sonja—a small-town Mississippian. I was a small-town Minnesotan. That relationship marked a turning point in my life and charted my career.

As a graduate student at Northwestern I taught North Park college classes in some of the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. In North Lawndale—then the city’s poorest neighborhood—my first assignment was to teach “Minority Cultures.” Wonderful North Park students, including Shirlee, Rita, and Valerie, taught me much more than I taught them about life in hyper-segregated places, subsisting on welfare while raising families, and striving to improve educational prospects. Those relationships undergirded my first major book with Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet.¹⁰Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997).

Later, as a professor, I received grants to follow families who escaped the vertical ghettos due to the landmark public-housing desegregation case Gautreaux et al. v. Chicago Housing Authority. The court found CHA and HUD guilty of discriminatory housing practices and required CHA to offer some residents vouchers to move to less-segregated neighborhoods. The early success of this program led HUD to create Moving to Opportunity. We interviewed families who moved. One mother said: “It was torture…like a bad dream…. My kids couldn’t go downstairs…people would get to shooting….” Another said: “It made you feel trapped, caged, and worthless…just stuck…no progress.”¹¹Quotes summarized from interviews reported in Kristin Turney, Rebecca Kissane, and Kathryn Edin, “After Moving to Opportunity: How Moving to a Low-poverty Neighborhood Improves Mental Health among African American Women,” Society and Mental Health 3, no. 1 (2013): 1–21.

Ellul conceded that the city is humanity’s most significant creation, yet insisted it still carries a tragic legacy—Babel, a site of rebellion against God. But the New Testament holds both distress and restoration in tension with Jerusalem. As Ellul scholar Noah Toly writes, God promises eventually to redeem the city—all cities—fully realized in the New Jerusalem.¹²Noah Toly, “The Meaning of the Global City: Jacques Ellul’s Continued Relevance to Twenty-first Century Urbanism,” Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society 32, no. 3 (2012): 235–236. In the “now but not yet,” Ellul urges Christians not to flee but to live and work in the city, representing God’s presence amid human self-sufficiency—seeking justice and mercy, expecting both suffering and miracles.

A century of census data from Chicago reveals an evolving portrait of racial and ethnic divides—with notable exceptions. The city’s historic Black Belt consolidated by 1940; by the 1970s the city was divided—nonwhites segregated South and West, whites in the North and Southwest. By 1980, Latino-majority districts had emerged (Pilsen, South Lawndale). Into 2000, segregation persisted, but neighborhoods with no majority population increased—including Albany Park, North Park’s neighborhood. Since diversifying, Albany Park has largely resisted rapid racial turnover. Today it is among the city’s five most diverse neighborhoods by race and class—and the most ethnically diverse. About half of residents are foreign-born, hailing from many countries; children speak dozens of languages. What are the chances?

What are the chances that a university built on farmland in 1894 on the outskirts of a burgeoning city would find itself, more than a century later, at ground zero—where people from varied backgrounds live together and sometimes bridge divides? Is this accident or providence?

Our long-term study of families who left hyper-segregated neighborhoods found that youth were ~2.5× more likely than their parents to graduate high school and ~4× more likely to enroll in college or trade school; 82 percent were “on track” (working or in school). The key: during adolescence, finding an “identity project”—a sustaining passion linking present challenges to future aspirations—often facilitated by adult mentors.¹³Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin, Coming of Age in the Other America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2016). A later team of economists using IRS data found that children offered the chance to move saw about one-third higher adult income, one-third more college-going, higher college quality, and a 27 percent reduction in single motherhood.¹⁴Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz, “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Project,” American Economic Review 106, no. 4 (2016): 855–902.

Just a little justice—a merciful relief from hyper-segregation—meant so much. This is powerful evidence that efforts to bring justice and mercy to the city can bear fruit.

Picture the Johnson Center’s Bickner Bistro, October 2018. Outside, the campus crossroads, a brick circle with a plaque: “Seek justice, love mercy, walk with God.” If the prophet Micah were here, perhaps he would add, “in the city.” Watching the diverse flow of students—future pastors, nurses, physicians, educators, historians, business people, engineers, musicians, artists, public servants, maybe sociologists—learning, living, competing, performing, serving, worshiping together…this is not normal in one of the most segregated cities in the nation. It looks like the kingdom breaking through.

Response

Michelle A. Clifton-Soderstrom, professor of theology and ethics, North Park Theological Seminary, Chicago, Illinois

Thank you, Dr. Edin, for your scholarship, your investment in North Park, and your passion for the kingdom. My remarks are directed to the work Dr. Edin is calling us to—a work that challenges North Park University’s core values of being Christian, city-centered, and intercultural.

I challenge us to greater maturity in our intercultural core value. Angela Davis argues there is a significant difference between multiculturalism and justice, especially racial justice.¹⁵Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prison, Torture, and Empire (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 31. It would be easy to believe that because we are diverse we have overcome racism. But multiculturalism is not a metaphor or a number; at its best, it creates spaces where cross-cultural communities name oppression, fight for justice, and address structural inequalities together. That is deeply Christian and city-centered.

Edin calls us to resist segregation. Social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew argues that hyper-segregation in America’s housing is “the structural linchpin of today’s patterns of institutional racism.”¹⁶Thomas Pettigrew, The Sociology of Race Relations: Reflection and Reform (Washington, DC: Free Press), 242. Spatially concentrated disadvantage in Chicago shows that our intercultural work toward racial justice lies ahead.

Consider Stateville Correctional Center. Though not on Chicago neighborhood maps, its population is largely drawn from the city’s South and West Sides. Approximately 60 percent of those at Stateville are Black (vs. 14 percent of Illinois’s population); ~30 percent are white (vs. ~70 percent statewide). The state’s prison population grew from about 6,000 in the mid-1970s to ~49,000 by 2019. At a time of increasing neighborhood integration, we have relocated people from Chicago’s Black Belt to Stateville. Stateville is arguably one of Chicago’s most segregated “neighborhoods.”

North Park is strategically situated not only to resist segregation but also to build. The kingdom of God allows us to transcend boundaries—Albany Park and beyond. We are resisting segregation at Stateville by building educational programming with incarcerated North Parkers: thirty-eight degree-seeking MA students, additional visiting students, undergraduate courses inside, Writing Center peer support, joint Gospel Choir concerts, and more than 300 free North Parkers (students, board members, Covenant representatives, donors) visiting Stateville. By blurring the lines between Albany Park and Stateville, we actively resist segregation.

Edin’s research shows that “identity projects” can interrupt the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage and change life trajectories.¹⁷DeLuca, Clampet-Lundquist, and Edin, Coming of Age in the Other America, 2. Christian higher education in the city—done creatively and reparatively—can be a healing balm. Under the leadership of President Surridge and colleagues, we are situated to do this urgent work. Her convocation prayer extended beyond campus boundaries—into Stateville—signaling that education may grant freedom and knows no restraint.

We will know our work of integration is complete when, in Edin’s words, all our brothers and sisters “learn together, live together, compete on the same teams, perform together, serve together, travel the city together…and pray and worship together.”

Response

Rich Kohng, director of civic engagement, Catalyst Hub, North Park University, Chicago, Illinois

Invoking Ellul offers a theological template for the city. Living between the now and not yet, we pray “your kingdom come” (Matthew 6:10) so heaven’s glimpses infiltrate our cities. Scripture not only foreshadows the end (New Jerusalem) but also looks back to the beginning (Eden). Eden symbolized perfect security with God and among others. Its river branched into four tributaries—including the Tigris and Euphrates (Genesis 2:14)—flowing beyond paradise to extend flourishing to all humanity. Boundaries come after the fall.

Modern boundaries differ: segregated housing, displaced communities. Edin describes the detrimental effects of Chicago and Baltimore’s segregated public housing and improved outcomes when residents moved to neighborhoods like Albany Park. Yet we must ask whether the mechanisms that created high-rises now operate in subtler forms elsewhere.

Chicago offers a metaphor. The Chicago River once carried waste into Lake Michigan—choking the city on its own byproducts. Today, investments similarly flow toward the Loop and elite corridors—TIF dollars for arenas, mega-developments like Lincoln Yards—while low-income communities are displaced, and gentrification accelerates.¹⁸Ben Joravsky, “Rahm’s Latest Plan: Close the Schools, Build an Arena,” Chicago Reader, May 23, 2013.¹⁹Patrick Sisson, “Can Megadevelopments Serve the Whole City?” Curbed, February 5, 2019. Emerson’s research contrasts “market cities” (more pollution, inequality, crime, less trust) with “people cities.”²⁰Emerson and Smiley, Market Cities, People Cities, 179.

Higher education mirrors these currents: amenities arms races, rising costs, debt burdens, and credential inflation push low-SES students to the margins.²¹Michelle Singletary, “US Student Loan Debt Reaches a Staggering $1.53 Trillion,” Washington Post, October 3, 2018.²²Lydia Dishman, “How the Master’s Degree Became the New Bachelor’s in the Hiring World,” Fast Company, March 17, 2016. Do we feed the same current—or help reverse the river, as Chicago once did through monumental public works led by immigrants (including Swedes)?²³Donald Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 423.²⁴Anita Olson Gustafson, “Swedes,” Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, 2005.

North Park already resists the flow: an affordable private education for a diverse student body; first-gen support (Lighthouse); a dynamic core; robust programs; and Catalyst 606__ experiential learning. On a recent visit to Cabrini-Green, our students met Shaq, a lifelong resident, who asked, “Do you feel safe?” They laughed; of course they did. But Shaq wasn’t safe—dollars and displacement replaced cannons and disease. His “just say hello” campaign reminds us to humanize one another in a polarized city. In that moment, students found traces of Eden amid the currents.

Until the currents change, may we remember that the waters of Eden still run through our campus—embodied in students whose vision points us to the headwaters. Changing the currents will require innovation and courage. Heaven—the New Jerusalem—is counting on it.

This article originally published with The Covenant Quarterly in February 2019.

Endnotes

• 1
  Hauna Ondrey, “Comment,” The Covenant Quarterly 77.1, Chicago: Covenant Publications, 2019.
• 2
  Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin Press, 2011).
• 3
  Ernest W. Burgess, “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project,” in Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925).
• 4
  Harvey Warren Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929).
• 5
  Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).
• 6
  Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1961).
• 7
  Michael Oluf Emerson and Kevin T. Smiley, Market Cities, People Cities: The Shape of Our Urban Future (New York: NYU Press, 2018), 158.
• 8
  Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 1.
• 9
  William J. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
• 10
  Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet: How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997).
• 11
  Quotes summarized from interviews reported in Kristin Turney, Rebecca Kissane, and Kathryn Edin, “After Moving to Opportunity: How Moving to a Low-poverty Neighborhood Improves Mental Health among African American Women,” Society and Mental Health 3, no. 1 (2013): 1–21.
• 12
  Noah Toly, “The Meaning of the Global City: Jacques Ellul’s Continued Relevance to Twenty-first Century Urbanism,” Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society 32, no. 3 (2012): 235–236.
• 13
  Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin, Coming of Age in the Other America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2016).
• 14
  Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and Lawrence Katz, “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children: New Evidence from the Moving to Opportunity Project,” American Economic Review 106, no. 4 (2016): 855–902.
• 15
  Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prison, Torture, and Empire (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 31.
• 16
  Thomas Pettigrew, The Sociology of Race Relations: Reflection and Reform (Washington, DC: Free Press), 242.
• 17
  DeLuca, Clampet-Lundquist, and Edin, Coming of Age in the Other America, 2.
• 18
  Ben Joravsky, “Rahm’s Latest Plan: Close the Schools, Build an Arena,” Chicago Reader, May 23, 2013.
• 19
  Patrick Sisson, “Can Megadevelopments Serve the Whole City?” Curbed, February 5, 2019.
• 20
  Emerson and Smiley, Market Cities, People Cities, 179.
• 21
  Michelle Singletary, “US Student Loan Debt Reaches a Staggering $1.53 Trillion,” Washington Post, October 3, 2018.
• 22
  Lydia Dishman, “How the Master’s Degree Became the New Bachelor’s in the Hiring World,” Fast Company, March 17, 2016.
• 23
  Donald Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 423.
• 24
  Anita Olson Gustafson, “Swedes,” Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, 2005.