What in This World Is the Meaning of Neighborliness?In addition to plowing through the dozen-or-so books on the topic of hospitality that have been released in the religious marketplace—all in the forty years since David C. Cook published my book, Open Heart, Open Home (which for many years was the only book on the theology of hospitality)—I have also read a dozen or so books on the state of neighborliness in contemporary America. According to the social analysts, the citizenry of these United States is in sad shape when it comes to practicing the old and traditional concept of being a good neighbor. And I, myself, over these last forty years, have been a major culprit. It used to be, when I was a child, first with memories of growing up on Logan Boulevard in Chicago, then as a grade- and high-schooler in Wheaton, Illinois, finally as a young married back in the city with a La Salle Street address, and then with a young and growing family in Oak Park, Illinois—in all these places, we knew our neighbors. We not only waved and said, “Hi!”, we called them by name, knew and interacted with their children, understood the ins and outs of where they worked and if they liked their jobs. We chatted across back porches, in our driveways as we were coming and going, shared recipes and borrowed empty-cupboard ingredients. We invited one another over for coffee-klatches or meals. Our streets were blocked off, tables and chairs dragged out for a potluck meal, with the added attraction of games planned for the kids (the messier, the better) as we celebrated the annual block party. After moving to West Chicago some forty years ago, all that changed. David and I were involved in national media ministries with demanding broadcasting and telecasting schedules. We traveled across the country speaking in retreats (for me) and leading pastors’ conferences (for David). During those decades we traveled to some 50 countries around the world (a cumulative tally). We wrote and published books and began our own publishing ministry division. Since we flew out of the area frequently, we felt fortunate that we were situated near highways that were a pretty straight shot to O’Hare Airport. In addition, at the time we moved to this house where we still live, we were surrounded on all sides by wooded lots. Even the lots across the quiet street were wooded. Whatever neighbors we had were several lots down the way, and due to the privacy afforded by all the trees and bushes and shrubs, we rarely saw them coming or going. Our unrelenting deadline schedules made it easy—necessary, actually—not to make any effort to get to know the folk who lived nearby. Plenty of people came and went to and from our home during those years. Live-ins and troubled companions, who’d lost their way for a little while, took shelter under our roof. Our four kids brought friends home. Internationals lived with us. The dinner table (as well as the breakfast buffet) was often set for company. During those years at 29W377 Hawthorne Lane, hospitality was alive and well. Sad to say, however, for the David R. Mains clan, the concept of neighborliness just about shriveled and died. I would like to claim that we were an anomaly, but according to the literature examining the whoever and whatever and wherever of neighborliness, the practice of being a good neighbor pretty much took a nosedive all across America to the point where that social construct in too many places all but vanished. The statistics are dire: We are losing the community life that used to make up the tightly woven fabric of our national life together. That certainly was true in the case of the Mainses. Not only had I not reached out to any of my neighbors, none of them had reached out to me. Word-of-mouth reported that if you happened to move into a new community and wanted to get to know the people around you, it would behoove you to bake 12-or-so loaves of your favorite bread and take them around, introducing yourselves: “Hi, we’re your new neighbors down the block (or across the way, or up the gravel road, or in the farmhouse over there, or on our apartment floor). Our names are ______________, and we’d just like to get to know the folk who live around us.” No wonder the statistics on loneliness are mounting to epidemic proportions. We are, in too many places, an isolated citizenry. So as is my wont, I started to research the meaning of neighborliness and what it takes to build meaningful, humane, citizen-led renewals of our towns and communities, of our big cities and little mountain hamlets. Frankly, I came away jazzed—when I expected to be discouraged. People in this country of ours are beginning to say, This alienation, this aloneness, this isolation is NOT the way things were meant to be. We CAN do something to make things much, much better. James and Deborah Fallows, the husband-and-wife journalism team, have traveled in their single-engine prop airplane, visiting towns across America where the danger of failure and collapse as a whole community has been turned around by the determined reformed measures of an active local government leadership working in conjunction with a determined citizenry. Many failing communities are renewing themselves as recorded in the uplifting discoveries of the Fallows writing team. Their book, Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, began my research into the condition of neighborliness in these United States. That reading led me to The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism by Bruce Katz and Jeremy Nowak. Back-cover copy gives several succinct summaries of this excellent study. Eric Garcetti, the mayor of Los Angeles, commends the authors: “In a time of increasing polarization and dysfunction, The New Localism demonstrates how cities can be the driving force of progress to move our nation forward and solve global problems. While state legislatures and national capitals are too-often paralyzed, local constituencies demand direct results and initiatives in larger cities that can spawn widespread solutions. This book showcases the best within our cities and is a resource for mayors and leaders everywhere to get things done for the people they serve.” Obviously, The New Localism emphasizes a macro overview starting with local governments in its analysis of what needs to be fixed in American society. Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, emphasizes this viewpoint in his review: “A book that goes beyond the daily headlines of political dysfunction to elevate the work of problem solvers who care about growth and inclusions. Central to the argument is the need to re-connect private capital to a public purpose and recover the potential of public wealth. This is a book about the future and it could not be more timely.” So what about a micro-emphasis? A look at the what is near and what is at hand. John McKnight and Peter Block are the gurus in examining why communities don’t work and what to do about it. The Abundant Community is a sociological handbook on the need for (as their subtitle emphasizes) “awakening the power of families and neighborhoods.” Parker Palmer reviews this book by writing, “‘What we need is here.’ That line from a Wendell Berry poem sums up the theme that runs through this vital and timely book. No one is better equipped to help us test this truth than John McKnight and Peter Block. This book is a treasure. And it can help us recover the treasures hidden in plain sight within and among us, renewing ourselves and our democracy as we go.” Next: Onto Timothy P. Carney’s book, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse. Again, cover copy: “Tim Carney delivers a masterly contribution to the debate on what is driving our society’s growing divisions. Rejecting purely material or demographic explanations, he shows the deepest disparity facing Americas today is one of community. Clear and compassionate, Alienated American offers a road map for the restoration of our nation.” – Arthur C. Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of The Conservative Heart. What the quotes on this back-cover copy do not emphasize is that Carney is a practicing Catholic who makes the point that part of the renewal needed in our American communities is a turning back to faith as an essential in halting the collapse of not only our moral base as a nation, but in the renewal of acts of superior charity, trust, civic involvement and neighborliness in our communities (!!!). Carney quotes an exhaustive project conducted by David Putnam, the author the classic Bowling Alone, who with the Notre Dame government scholar David Campbell conducted exhaustive research into the breakdown of society. “This volume,” Carney writes, “reaffirmed that the church was the most important institution of civil society in America, and that it provided great benefit to its members and the broader community. ‘Religious Americans are, in fact, more generous neighbors and more conscientious citizens than their secular counterparts.’” Now I can go on (and I will go on in future issues of Soulish Food) down the bibliography I’ve accumulated on the loss of neighborhood life and how it can be restored. But let me give a Reader Alert: I am deeply persuaded that one of the reasons we have lost neighborliness in many parts of the country is due to the deactivation of the Christian responsibility to be good neighbors. Our conservative churches are so concentrated on what goes on within the confinements of their life together, or of the few projects we support overseas, that we have neglected the essential need of attending to the social fabric of the nearby neighborhoods outside our local doors. Putnam and Campbell’s research indicated that the aspect of religiosity that builds civic virtues is church attendance, and the best predictor of these civic virtues is a regular attendance at church. “Once we know how observant a person is in terms of church attendance, nothing that we can discover about the content of her religious faith adds anything to our understanding of her good neighborliness.” What?—does this means that regular church attendance bolsters the capacity to befriend, offer mercy and compassion, include and invite, be concerned about, then notice and connect with the family next door or across the hall, up or across the street, on the other side of the field or wooded lot, or the house in which the backside faces our backside more than any other measurement of faith? Yep! Sure does. Author Carney reports that even before the follow-up research after the publication of his classic book Bowling Alone, Putnam’s research showed that putting all the talk about bowling leagues and Kiwanis and Rotary Club memberships aside, the dominant source of civic activity in America is the church. “As a rough rule of thumb, our evidence shows, nearly half of all associational memberships in America are church-related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context.” My emphasis in this summer’s Soulish Food will be on how hospitality, combined with a restoration of the concept of neighborliness, works out in my personal life—starting with my new neighbor in the house next door (on the other side of a wooded easement) whose home was burglarized a month after she moved in—welcome to the neighborhood! But I’m hoping this bibliography of all the books I’ve read on the two above topics (some 24 books in all) will be a starting point for church action teams, for pastors’ sermons, for readers whose hearts are stirred by the need to salvage our democracy (yes! That’s what many of these authors infer) … starts with creating neighborliness again in the places where we live. Actually, writing about these topics is a self-centered venture. The very action of writing forces me to report what I, personally, am doing about the problem of alienation in our culture. Writing, in itself, is a means of holding myself accountable to the idea that is pushing at my conscience and at my soul. I
have a deep desire, in fact, believe I am Holy Spirit-driven, to be
obedient to Christ’s command to “love your neighbor as
yourself.” NOTICESBibliography of Books on Neighborliness
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 Karen Mains I am deeply
persuaded that one of the reasons we have lost neighborliness in many
parts of the country is due to the deactivation of the Christian
responsibility to be good neighbors.
BOOK CORNER
 Building Communities From the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets by John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight Through
my involvement as a board director for the faith-based world-health
nonprofit Medical Ambassadors International, I was introduced to the
concept of asset-based community building approach. This tactic goes
into villages and slums and rural hamlets and is an extraordinary
empowerment tool. Instead of concentrating on the problems that exist
in these places and among the people who live there, it looks at what
gifts and energies and capacities these residents hold. What can we do? Who is able to contribute what? How can we activate ourselves to accommodate desperately needed change? Somewhere in my 8 years of service for MAI, someone probably mentioned that this most-effective approach had been developed by Kretzmann and McKnight, but perhaps not. When a tool is utilized, works and ownership develops, it doesn’t matter so much who developed it as the fact that it is helping change lives for the better—in fact, the approach is helping to transform whole communities for the better. This book, Building Communities From the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets, by John P. Kretzmann and John L. McKnight, is literally the handbook on the topic. Trialed, tested and developed on the streets of Chicago, its main market is people working in under-resourced communities. The back-cover copy explains: “‘Communities cannot be rebuilt by focusing on their needs, problems, and deficiencies,’ insist Kretzmann and McKnight of the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. Rather, they claim, community building starts with locating the assets, skills, and capacities of residents, citizens, civic associations and local institutions. This book was the first to develop the concept of asset-based community development (ABCD), which is now one of the most productive approaches being used to rebuild communities around the world.” I’ve seen some of those “communities around the world.” This approach is, indeed, a wonder-worker. Filled with pages of practical tools, it is a must-have handbook for those working in poverty-line neighborhoods. However, I am suspecting the surveys, etc., included between its covers is also adaptable to upper- or middle-class communities such as the one I am living in—the diverse, unpretentious-appearing little hometown of West Chicago. At any
rate, it is a Must-Have for the shelf marked
“Neighborliness” of any concerned neighbor wannabe,
regardless of income level. The asset-based approach works just as well
with families where teens are being raised as it works in distant
villages struggling to overcome poverty just to stay alive! |