-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Mark W. Elliott, The Common Good and the Global Emergency: God and the Built Environment. By T. J. Gorringe., The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 64, Issue 1, April 2013, Pages 337–341, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/fls164
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
There can be no doubting the author’s sense of adventure: a theologian, he has taken great pains to learn from ecologists and economists, architects and planners. Their contributions should serve to keep any theology ‘grounded’. One slight cause for concern is the following line in the Preface: ‘that earlier world, in twelfth-century Europe, where, while the military classes engaged in power games, the intellectuals and artisans learned from each other and largely agreed on fundamentals’. As well as being somewhat superficial as history, this suggests that there will always be a ‘them and us’ dichtotomy: one is likely to agree with this book’s thesis only if one is politically powerless. Of course the point that today’s urban skylines do reflect a hierarchy of values is well taken.
A slight lack of accuracy dogs the book as it gets going: is it right to call the effects of Dominican presence in Siena ‘Thomist’? Odd things such as ‘Baedeker raids’ and ‘Jane Jacobs’ orthodoxy’ are mentioned (pp. 7–8) without any explanation of these. We have ‘Tenakh’ where it should be ‘Tanakh’ (p. 14). But this is to quibble, and the rest of the book does not seem so beset by such blemishes. Indeed, overall this book is a worthy successor to the author’s A Theology of the Built Environment (2002), and there is a pleasing sense of command of the material. He is not afraid to claim that ‘concern with the built environment springs from the most central core of Christian faith’ (p. 12). There is perhaps an unacknowledged tension, when in the opening chapter he argues that ‘matter matters’, and yet also implies that it doesn’t matter, since it is merely a symptom of ethical–spiritual de- or re-generation.
