Abstract
Clergy responses to economic formation and de-formation within American ‘Rust Belt’ cities such as Pittsburgh and Detroit are examined in the light of conceptions of civic and Christian ‘community’ as drawn from select sources in ethics and political philosophy. The relative absence of clergy from urban economic restructuring efforts within these contexts is noted in the essay, while also paying attention to several notable clergy exceptions to this pattern who provided important critiques of corporate sector economic predations and of clergy moral indifference or active complicity.
This chapter is a revised version of the original article “Higher ground: The elusive church consensus on equality, empowerment, and community in urban America” appeared in Pittsburgh Theological Journal 2014: 25–39.
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Notes
- 1.
Niebuhr [12].
- 2.
Niebuhr [11, pp. 47–48, 83–84, 113–119, 132–135, 160].
- 3.
Detroit Free Press [4, pp. 107, 110, 114, 622].
- 4.
Darden [2, p. 24].
- 5.
World Population Review.Com [19].
- 6.
World Population Review.Com [18].
- 7.
- 8.
UPMC [16].
- 9.
Niebuhr, Leaves, p. 123.
- 10.
Niebuhr, “Lessons of the Detroit Experience’, p. 487.
- 11.
Hembree [6].
- 12.
- 13.
Marsico [9].
- 14.
DeBonis [3].
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
United States [15].
- 17.
U.S. Census Bureau [17].
- 18.
Douglas Massey [10].
- 19.
Pope Francis [13].
- 20.
Smith [14], pp. 8–9.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 449.
- 22.
Martin [8].
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Drew Smith, R. (2020). Inequality in Urban America and Clergy Advocacy on Economic Restructuring. In: Xie, Z., Kollontai, P., Kim, S. (eds) Human Dignity, Human Rights, and Social Justice. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5081-2_13
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