This 10 minute video put together by the Thriving Communities Group is a beautiful introduction to our vital need for a renewed Shalomic imagination for faithful presence within the ecosystem of relations that sustain life. The video is really good! I recommend watching it and sharing it. I’m new to the Thriving Communities Group, but it appears they use a multi-disciplinary approach that brings together decades of research, training, community organizing and technology.
They have a trifold focus of: community craft, civic design, and what they call round table.
I’ve just begun poking around their site but I a feel a lot of kinship with what they are doing and how they seem to be going about it. I still maintain that the core human-scaled practice for thriving cities is a ground practice of faithful presence within a neighborhood. It is within the everyday stuff of life and the interactions within the place(s) where we live most of our lives, that we most see and feel the real impact of our presence with people, the creational/built environments, systems, histories, narratives, economics, civics, education and so on. And its also so important when we talk about thriving cities that redefine city to include the bioregion in which the city is located. We can’t afford to drive a wedge between urban an rural… cities are somewhere… and that “somewhere” matters. What is a faithful relationship between an urban human settlement and the rural bioregion that supports it?
Peace, dwight
