The Big Picture Magazine 7 (2023) on Food and Place

The seventh issue of The Big Picture, a magazine produced by the Kirby Laing Centre, has recently been made available.

Among other items, this issue devotes several articles to the theme of food and place.

More information is available here, and the issue can be downloaded as a pdf here.

Online versions of the previous issues of the magazine are available from here.

Journal of Missional Practice (Winter 2018)

The Journal of Missional Practice is published online by The Missional Network.

The Winter 2018 edition was recently posted, devoted to ‘Questions of Place’, with an opening editorial by Alan Roxburgh:

Here are some excerpts from the editorial:

‘We are witnessing a resurgence of interest in questions of place – it comes in multiple forms such as rediscovering the local or understanding what Christian life has to do with presence. This is quite a significant shift in which many of us are trying to sort out what it means to be located, to have our lives shaped by the notion of neighborhood.

‘What, therefore, is the meaning of place for Christian life in the modern West? I’m discovering this is not as easy a question to answer as I first imagined.

‘A young, educated millennial often sees place (with its connotations of neighborhood and belonging) as something of an outmoded notion in a digital world where the geographies of modern cities and their relationships are more determined by technology and social media than by physical space.

‘I listen to many Euro-tribal Christians for whom space and place are given meaning through the lenses of “real-estate” (property to be owned, bought and sold for the purpose of maximizing one’s social and economic life) or the lenses of career development where place is a moment in time, where I happen to be somewhere, but then will be moving on to somewhere else at some point.

‘Then I realize how limited and out of tune is the Euro-tribal church’s relationship to place.

‘In this Issue of the Journal we want to invite you to join with us in listening with other Christians who are wrestling with this question of the local and place. For them this is not about new tactics to become a relevant church. It goes deeper than that.’

Jamison Galt on Place

Jamison Galt, ‘Christ and the Cubicle: A Meditation on Place’, Comment (11 November 2011).

In part a review of Craig Bartholomew’s recent and (I think) excellent book, Where Mortals Dwell: A Christian View of Place for Today (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), and in part a mediation, Jamison Galt reflects on ‘space’ and the work of ‘placemaking’ for displaced people.

‘Much of our experience of this world is marked by architectural blandness, urban destitution, strip-mall ennui, shrapnel in poppy fields, the cog-in-a-wheel cubicle, gulags, tenements, the home as consumer product, threatening wilderness, or simply what Walker Percy refers to as the malaise of an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. Too often we find ourselves fractured from place, alienated from home and with no sense that where we are has a modicum of meaning.’

Of Bartholomew’s book, he writes:

‘Bartholomew sets forth the whole world as God’s home, and it’s fair to say that he explores nearly every nook and cranny, bringing forth from this storehouse treasures new and old. The exploration involves rigorous biblical-theological work, discourse with the history of philosophy, as well as theories of and challenges to contemporary placemaking. The discovery is a blueprint for the rehabilitation of God’s house, and the surprise that even the desk in front of you is a newfound treasure.’

Galt hopes that ‘if we are attentive to the nuance and import of place – in history – we will be better attuned to God’s efforts of redemptive place-making in this world’.

‘It is in such efforts, engaged in each and every place, that the kingdom of this world is revealed as the very kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. And each of us priests of our own little cubicle, preparing this world to become for us and for God truly and finally, home.’