Christianity and Culture in the City - by Samuel Cruz (Paperback)

About the Book

This volume examines how the manifestation and development of diverse expressions of Christianities in the city offer potentialities and innovative models for the liberation struggles and gospel incarnation within various social, historical, economic, cultural/ethnic, sexual, and gender realities.

Book Synopsis

Christianity and Culture in the City: A Postcolonial Approach offers an introduction to the broad diversity of contemporary Christianities in a rich, complex, changing, and challenging city context. Cruz focuses upon a variety of changing communities with dynamic and striking cultural experiences, and the volume provides both scholarly and practical insights as to how Christianities in the city relate to and transform city institutions and communities that are undergoing dramatic shifts and invite opportunities for intentional study.

This book offers a provocative interdisciplinary examination to shed light upon the ways in which diverse city communities appropriate Christianity to better engage their economic, cultural, political, and religious environment. A post-colonial theoretical framework will help inform how Christianity serves to empower and reinvent fragmented, oppressed, and struggling city populations. The reader is offered various conceptual, theoretical, and pragmatic insights and knowledge for better interpreting, affirming, and engaging diverse Christianities in the city in a postcolonial era.

Review Quotes

"City life is complicated. Religious expressions within cities are even more difficult to ascertain. Cruz brings together scholars who explore marginalized religious spaces within cities to discover that what people claim to believe in theory, what they say about their faith, and how they live out that faith can be quite incongruent. Most religious scholars miss this because they fail to consider the complicated ethnic, cultural, and political realities of the everyday. As a corrective, this book provides us with a liberative critical reflection on the praxis of the disenfranchised." --Miguel A. De La Torre, professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies, Iliff School of Theology

"Samuel Cruz is a major prophetic voice who understands that urban Christian visions and witnesses constitute much of the best of our future!" --Cornel West, Union Theological Seminary

City life is complicated. Religious expressions within cities are even more difficult to ascertain. Cruz brings together scholars who explore marginalized religious spaces within cities to discover that what people claim to believe in theory, what they say about their faith, and how they live out that faith can be quite incongruent. Most religious scholars miss this because they fail to consider the complicated ethnic, cultural, and political realities of the everyday. As a corrective, this book provides us with a liberative critical reflection on the praxis of the disenfranchised.

Samuel Cruz is a major prophetic voice who understands that urban Christian visions and witnesses constitute much of the best of our future!

About the Author

Samuel Cruz is a sociologist of religion, race, sexuality and gender. Dr. Cruz is assistant professor of Church and Society at Union Theological Seminary City of New York. Dr. Cruz's publications include a book, Masked Africanisms: Puerto Rican Pentecostalism (Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2005) as well as a number of book chapters and journal articles on Latina/o and global Pentecostalism, urban religion and on the sociology of religion--principal areas of his research and teaching. Dr. Cruz is also Senior Pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, NY.