More than a decade ago my family and I moved to Grand Rapids. In the search of a house I kept going back to one particular neighborhood. What drew me there? Perhaps something in the built environment -- sidewalks or the small neighborhood shopping center -- reflected something appealing. I speculate that the habits of living embedded in a place -- the sense of place -- that developed during a time when the neighborhood was more homogeneous have been passed on to the new families who now come from a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds. Places continue to develop and come into being through a variety of means.
As I contemplated all these issues recently, I sat in a coffee shop in my neighborhood shopping center, a district that everyone had worked hard to maintain. The hardware store, against all odds, rebuilt after a fire and, just this fall, a new vegetable and fruit market opened after a three years gap since the closure of the previous grocery store. The new store has much more local produce. The coffee shop, library, and ice cream shop are busy. And recently some of the local churches have joined to form the Stewards of Plaster Creek, a group that is moving the faith community toward action in restoring the creek that travels through this part of the city, providing habitat for everything from wild turkeys to salmon. Through greater attention to our impact on the community of the watershed, we try to work to bring Shalom in the place where we live.
We are attempting to form spiritual disciplines, or habits of life, that help us “know” our piece of the Earth. I believe my neighbors and I are moving closer to a fully integrated life—shalom—when we experience the joy of the neighborhood children who walk to the Tuesday evening book reading at the ice cream shop, and the excitement of locals who stop to tell us they have seen the wild turkeys on their walk. For me? I experience shalom every time I can walk into the hardware store with parts from my bathroom shower in my hand, and have the owners hand me replacement pieces AND tell me how to put it all back together.

The connection between land and community

Throughout my academic career, there are three questions that have continued to stalk me, all relating to the relationship between land and community:

What does it mean to truly “know” a piece of the Earth?

Can landscapes unconsciously tell us whether we are getting closer to a fully
integrated life—shalom—or further away?

What is the relationship between spirituality and place?


I have come to believe that the Earth is crying out for Christians to begin to take seriously their relationship to it and the relationship of the Earth to our Creator. The land suffers alongside human communities yet we fail to recognize and probe the deep connections among the suffering. Perhaps we should do as Wes Jackson suggests to begin the process of understanding,

“What if we employed our rivers and creeks in some ritual atonement? Their sediment load is largely the result of agricultural practices based upon arrogance, tied in turn to an economic system based upon arrogance…but perhaps we need an annual formal observance in the spring - when the rivers are particularly muddy - a kind of ecological rite of atonement, in which we would ‘gather at the river.’ Maybe we should ally ourselves by virtue of a common watershed…for a watershed can and often does cut through more than one bioregion. There would be nothing abstract about a common covenant among people of a common watershed (Jackson 1987, 155).”

In his book, Wisdom Sits in Places, Keith Basso describes his work with the Western Apache in recording place names. He soon learned that stories were associated with place names. Just saying a place name then became used as a moral teaching (arrows pointed at the heart). The path to wisdom involved knowing the places, the stories, and their meaning as well as walking through that space. What if the Western Apache were removed from that place?

What does it mean to truly “know” a piece of the Earth?

Can landscapes unconsciously tell us whether we are getting closer to a fully
integrated life—shalom—or further away?

What is the relationship between spirituality and place?

Regional Geography as Narrative

I have been trying to get my students to think of regional geography of Michigan as narrative rather than as a list of "people, places, and products."

We examine the present patterns--the end of the narrative--and then try to tell the story that led up to this ending. The copper mining area of Michigan in the UP, with its universities focused on geology and engineering arose out of deep history--the exposure of some of the oldest rocks in the world and a fault line. At the same time that mining peaked, immigration from Finland also was at a height, contributing to the Finnish cultural heritage of the area. I have a neighbor in Grand Rapids who is Finnish Lutheran, from the U.P.

Every place is the result of a complex story line. What is the narrative of your "place?"