Abstract
This is how the city guide, Max, a part-time tourist guide from New York City, would dispose of the Charismatic City and hasten on to a more spirited topic if the Charismatic City as such existed. The Charismatic City, however, is not one city, it is a thousand or more cities, all very much alike and scattered across the world from London to Buenos Aires, from New York to New Delhi, and Rome to Lagos.1
Charismatic City (population 8.3 billion, altitude 2,490 feet/759 meters), situated on a medium rise overlooking the southern branch of the Half Yellow Sea, is a financial, cultural, technological, and religious center served by desire and innovation. It was a scene of concentrated divine presence symbolized by a sacred golden stool, which caused bloody encounters between nations. It was where radicals smashed the stool and scattered its pieces all over the city to create a new city, and also used some of the pieces to make plowshares. It is a site of globalized connections, digital factories, a milk processing plant, and an overall energy factory. Its green space, forests, and parks are devoted to enable its residents to experience awe. A silk road now passes through its core—one devoted to well-orbed human well-being—sensing the broken stool scattered among seven hills. Barring a sudden run of bad luck this century, its intellectuals and pop culture experts think the song “Can we all get along?” will dominate the billboards.
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Notes
John Brinckerhoff Jackson, “The Almost Perfect Town,” in The City Reader, ed. Richard T. LeGates and Fredric Stout, 5th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2011), 203–10. Jackson’s description of “Optimo City” influenced my opening description of the Charismatic City, and I have blended his words into this opening paragraph.
Karin Barber, “Yoruba Oriki and Deconstructive Criticism,” Research in African Literatures 13, no. 4 (1984): 510–11,
quoted in Andrew Apter, Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 118.
On the issues of tactile element of power and distancing and domesticating of power, see Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 212–213. His work inspired this paragraph and the previous one.
Mark R. Gornik, Word Made Global: Stories of African Christianity in New York City (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 8, 19–20.
Adapted from a report by Dr. Wilhelmina (Wilma) Davies, Buenos Aires, May 2002 (PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham, England, researching Argentinean Pentecostalism), quoted in Allan Anderson, An Introduction to Pentecostalism: Global Charismatic Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 6–7. The characters of Mercedes (from Rome) and the Birmingham woman are fictional. I described the scene Mercedes saw in Brooklyn, New York, with my own words; and I set the Birmingham woman to travel to Argentina and use the quotation of the description of a Pentecostal worship by the scholar Davies to indicate what the fictional character saw in her travel. Dr. Davies visited the church led by Rev. Claudio Freidon and recorded this scene.
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 140.
Lamin Sanneh, Disciples of All Nations: Pillars of World Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 13–14.
Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 63.
Elizabeth Jarrell Callender, “A Theology of Spatiality: The Divine Perfection of Omnipresence in the Theology of Karl Barth” (PhD dissertation, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2011), 219–20. I borrowed the words of Callender to express my ideas.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 209.
Max Stackhouse, God and Globalization: Globalization and Grace, vol. 4 (New York: Continuum, 2007), 57.
Nimi Wariboko, The Principle of Excellence: A Framework for Social Ethics (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009).
Jean-Luc Nancy, Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity 2, trans. John McKeane (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 47–49, 59, 65, 102–4.
The concept of the common good as developed in this book is indebted to Daniel Barber’s interpretation of immanence. I have followed his interpretation to creatively fashion a fresh conceptuality of common good on the pivot of immanence. See Daniel Coluccielo Barber, On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011).
I consider the common good as the ordered arrangement (oikonomian) of goods in the house (oikos) of the people. Elsewhere I have provided a rigorous philosophical understanding of this conceptualization. See Nimi Wariboko, Methods of Ethical Analysis: Between Theology, History, and Literature (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2013), 143–51.
John Berger, The Look of Things (New York: Viking, 1974), 40, quoted in Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 22; italics in the original.
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Space,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 22–27. Translated from French by James Miskowiec. The quotation is from page 22.
Martin Buber, “Distance and Relation,” Psychiatry 20 (1957): 97–104.
Catherine Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1996), xiii; see also 134.
Graham Ward, Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000), 77; see 93, 94, 112–14. In another place, describing the body of Christ as transcorporeal, he writes: Continually called to move beyond itself, the transcorporeal body itself becomes eucharistic, because endlessly fractured and fed to others … The transcorporeal body expands in its fracturing, it pluralises, as it opens itself towards an eternal growth … As such “This is my body” announces, for the Christian the scandal of both crucifixion and resurrection, both a dying-to-self-positing and an incorporation. (95–96)
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 250.
Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), 178.
Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 4.
Jacob Kehinde Olupona, City of 201 Gods: Ilé-Ifè in Time, Space, and the Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brains?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 11. This paragraph draws from Malabou’s discussion of brain plasticity and her phrases and phraseology.
As an aside, permit me to mention that the hieroglyphic symbol for the city is a cross within a circle. The cross represents flows and convergences of people, ideas, products, and roads. The circle represents the borders/boundaries within which human lives can flourish. Together they represent communication and togetherness, as Robert S. Lopez interprets the symbol. He warns that if the speed of communication becomes excessive or the boundary (wall) becomes “too high and tight” they can affect the city’s well-being, hinder growth, and frustrate the opportunity to reach to places and persons beyond it. See Robert S. Lopez, “The Crossroads within the Wall,” in The Historian and the City, ed. Oscar Handlin and John Burchard (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and Harvard University Press, 1963), 27–43. The notion of Charismatic City, as undergirded by the concept of the body of Christ, that is being developed in this book avoids these pitfalls.
Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey W. Robbins, Religion, Politics and the Earth: The New Materialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 120–23, 138, 145–50.
For a perspective on why the body of Christ is—and must be—aligned with the interest of victims, see René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001);
and Enrique Dussel, Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, trans. Eduardo Mendieta, Camilo Peréz Bustillo, Yolanda Angulo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
See Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda, Resisting Structural Evil: Love as Ecological Vocation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013).
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Wariboko, N. (2014). Introduction. In: The Charismatic City and the Public Resurgence of Religion. CHARIS: Christianity and Renewal—Interdisciplinary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463197_1
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