Glenn Smith - Plenary - November 18, 2009
Glenn Smith’s session was powerful. His theme was about moving faith from being privatized to one that interacts with the public sphere. He gave an excellent overview of some of the ways Canadian cities are different than American cities:
- poverty is diffuse in Canadian cities - it is not localized to a few neighbours
- 1 in 3 Canadians is from either Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto
- we use public transport more than American
- we have greater ethnic diversity
- we have more traditional family structures
- we have stable growth
- we live in safer cities
- Our governments structures are more complicated
- 52% of city revenue comes from taxes (in the US it’s 27%)
His definition of neighbourhood was also useful. Volumes are written about how to define neighbourhoods (Physical? Architectural? Geographical? Cultural? Economic?) however for him neighbourhoods are places that do something. Neighbourhoods act upon residents and function technologically, politically, demographically, or sociologically. They possess a specific way of doing life. They have specific imaginations. It is our task to become students of these realities.
However for me the big mental grenade came from a word that he passed along to us via "A Secular Age" by Charles Taylor: excarnation. Excarnation, according to Taylor is "the transfer of our religious life out of bodily forms of ritual, worship, practice, so that it comes more and more to reside "in the head". Christianity was born, literally, out of an incarnation. God incarnated himself through Jesus. Another way to say this is that Jesus embodied God. The church, is supposed to be the body of Christ. However, through the influence of modernity it has become disembodied or excarnated. We live in our heads. Our faith is a series of propositions rather that trust in a person. Jesus did not teach that his ideas were the Truth, he claimed to BE the truth; the truth personified; the truth incarnated.
More thinking and processing needed on that one!