Ben Norquist and I wrote Every Somewhere Sacred: Rescuing a Theology of Place in the American Imagination and it is out today! Find the book here and read an excerpt here.
Category Archives: Publications
1 day until Every Somewhere Sacred: writing and waiting, learning and doing
Writing a book does not just involve putting words on a page, or, more accurately, typing letters into computer software. It involves thinking, discussing, doing. I find it hard to write something without first turning it through in my mind over and over as well as living out the ideas and the questions. Here are two examples from the process of creating Every Somewhere Sacred.
First, I live in the suburbs of the United States. These are unique settings with particular histories. A majority of Americans live there, including many American Christians. (Read Sanctifying Suburbia for more on this.) What does difference, if any, should it make to be Christian and live in the suburbs?
Thinking about this is important. It is easy to live a suburban life, including doing Christian things as part of this life. Doing is also important: Christians are to use their minds and their bodies as they live out their faith.
Second, lots of American communities are home to Christian congregations and organizations. How do these Christian groups shape places and land? Are they primarily focused on their own internal activities or do they contribute to the flourishing of communities and places?
I ask this as I live and work in a suburb partly known for its religious character. In addition to being home to a known evangelical college, it is home to 40+ churches and many evangelical organizations are in the suburb or nearby. Does this mean the character of the community is different in terms of how people interact (interpersonally and collectively) and how land and creation are treated?
I hope the years spent working with Ben on writing this book also influenced how I act. My question about living in the suburbs or Christians meeting together in certain locations could apply to any place and setting. We address both thinking and doing in Every Somewhere Sacred. We argue we need new tools, metaphors, and lenses to help us recognize what is going on in lands and places and to see what God is doing. We want to act with these lenses, listening to others, open to what we might have missed, and acting in ways that are consistent with God’s mission. If we can see land and place as a gift, sacrament, kin, or home, it can prompt us to better participate in what God is already doing in these settings.
4 days until Every Somewhere Sacred: getting involved in local community organizations and politics
I enjoy looking out the windows on one side of my house and seeing a pond. It was created during housing development in the early 1970s and likely helps with water drainage and stormwater issues. It also is home to fish and hosts numerous birds, including egrets, cormorants, and ducks.
If I had a concern about the pond behind my house, who would I contact? I could get in the touch with the homeowner’s association that owns the property. I might connect with my municipality. Perhaps there is a communityy group interested in local water and wildlife concerns.
Many decisions about the immediate land and places around us are made at the local level in the United States. National issues and politics often dominate discussions. It can be hard today to find information about local matters given changes in media. Yet, local politicians, government staff, and local organizations all regularly address our local built environments. They often have oversight of the land and places we interact with every day.
Some people know about this at the local level and get involved. Loud and resourced voices at the local can often get the results they want. Some others may not know about the local effects on land and places and other may know and not respond. For example, social scientists have argued that in recent decades people in the United States are less involved in civic organizations compared to the past. These may be national groups but they act at the local level, bringing people together to address local issues. Or, there are elected local officials who working with property tax money and other revenues see to address local concerns. Where I live, voter turnout for these local elections is quite low.
As Ben Norquist and I write in Every Somewhere Sacred, God cares about and has plans for land and places. And he invites humans to participate in and help carry out these plans. We can do things as individuals but we can and should also act collectively, working in communities to care for land and places. This work should extend beyond our own interests – such as common NIMBY responses – to consider how people and places can flourish together.
For Christians, this should involve churches caring for land and places, developing and acting on their imaginations within their communities and with other nearby groups. Why not get involved with local concerns? Address local issues? Collectively work to help Creation flourish? Connect theology and practice, worship and service, people and land.
Back to the pond just beyond my property line. If there was a major concern, I would hope I would do something constructive for the good of the community and not just for my own property interests. One common solution in our world – let others take care of it – should not be the option Christians take. May we work together to see and act on land as gift, kin, sacrament, and/or home.
5 days until Every Somewhere Sacred: caring for and learning from a suburban yard
The yard for my suburban house is 0.26 acres. On all four sides, the house is surrounded by grass, bushes and trees, and wildlife. This is part of the American Dream: a suburban single-family home for a family framed by green grass and attractive landscaping. All that nature in the yard allows space for kids to play in a private setting free from threats. Or perhaps it is about keeping the lawn extra green and finely trimmed and completely free of weeds and leaves so that the nature around the home leads to a higher return on investment.
What could it look like for Christians to expand their imagination about the nature around them rather than defaulting to American land stories and half-truths? In Every Somewhere Sacred, Ben Norquist and I consider better ways to engage with God’s plans for land and places.
What might that mean for my yard? It is certainly not “wild” land. Humans have been in this area for a long time, including Indigenous people and white settlers starting in the 1830s. This particular plot of land was farmed for decades before a developer started putting up houses in the early 1970s. As they put up houses, they shaped other features of the land, putting in a pond that some of the homes back up to, leaving numerous older trees along the main road through the neighborhood, and situating other homes to back up to a public park.
The land is not there just to serve my financial interests or the specific needs of my household. My yard is connected to other yards and it part of a broader ecosystem. Some animals and plants thrive in suburban settings. Others do not. I regularly see rabbits and have occasionally spotted foxes. Chickadees, robins, cardinals, red-tailed hawks, cormorants, and Canadian geese can be seen and heard. Insects are around. We have a small, simple garden that requires weeding and watering. I do not fertilize my yard or use weed killer. We occasionally trim the bushes and trees.
I want the nature around me to flourish. I am created, nature is created. My yard presents a small opportunity for me to learn from and with Creation about God and the world. We can tend, cultivate, plant, tear up when needed. We can work with nature rather than just extracting value from it.
In our book, we describe four different lenses different Christians have developed to help us better understand the physical world around us: land as gift, sacrament, kin, and home. If I took time with each of these and applied them to my own yard, what could I see differently? As I retrieve a basketball from the rose bushes next to the driveway planted by previous occupants of our home or when I drag the hose to the backyard to water our garden or when I put down mulch in the flower beds or when I hear a woodpecker in a nearby tall tree, how might I better see God and the world?
6 days until Every Somewhere Sacred: walking to know places
Last night, I drove home from church over a stretch of road I have traveled hundreds of times in my life. The road passes by suburban low-rise office buildings and businesses, houses, and open fields. On this warm and humid night, I drove with the windows open, smelling the different contexts as air flowed through the car.
This common driving experience may be how Americans regularly experience places. At speeds from 25 mph to 75 mph, we use a network of roads and highways to get where we want to go. We see driving as offering independence and we advertise it as an enjoyable experience.
In Every Somewhere Sacred (out June 16), Ben Norquist and I discuss how Christians can exercise our imaginations to tell better stories about land and places. And I’m not sure driving does much to further our imaginations of how God has acted, is acting, and will act in and through places.
That is why I would recommend walking as a great means to get to know a place. Using the bipedal locomotion humans have used throughout history, we can better see, hear, touch, and smell places. Walking limits our speed. It pushes us to consider our own physical bodies as we interact with other physical creations. it gives us space and a rhythm to consider what is happening around us. It gives us the same opportunities that many before us have had, including Adam and Eve walking through the Garden of Eden or the freed people of God walking out of Egypt or Jesus walking the shores of the Sea of Galilee or in Nazareth. Before people wanted to get in 10,000 steps a day or stuck in their ear buds while walking, they used their feet to move in and near their homes and communities.
I did not always like walking. As a kid, I would have preferred to be inside reading or watching sports compared to being outside. But not only is walking necessary at times (even in our car-dependent society), it can be enjoyable. For example, I walked to and from my high school numerous times. Often I had headphones on, listening to new music I discovered or to a Cubs game. The walk took about 20 minutes. As I walked the same route over and over, first around 7 in the morning and later around 3:30 in the afternoon, I started noticing things. How one big field next to the railroad tracks changed over the course of the year. I observed people and houses as I passed. I could see differences between neighborhoods built in different decades.
I try to walk regularly now. I have some set paths near my house as well as around my work. I enjoy walking in big cities, suburbs, and more rural or wild areas. I have walked alone, with people, in crowds, and with dogs. The simple, repeated action of walking has helped expand my imagination for what God is already doing in and through land and places.
Book cover for Every Somewhere Sacred: Rescuing a Theology of Place in the American Imagination (out June 16, 2026)
Ben Norquist and I have a book titled Every Somewhere Sacred: Rescuing a Theology of Place in the American Imagination coming out June 16, 2026 with IVP Academic. See the cover below:
Pre-order the book here. Download a free chapter here.
Ben and I have worked on this book for years. We had co-authored an article titled “Christian Colleges in the Locational Wilderness: The Locations of CCCU Institutions” that was published Christian Higher Education in 2021. Ben had done some research into his family’s property with those efforts published as “My land acknowledgement” in Christian Century in November 2023.
By November 2022, we had a working outline of the book and a draft proposal for the project. We were excited about the possibilities of considering land and places from a theological and social science point of view. We agreed there was a need for a book that helped American Christians think about approaches to land and place, to consider what did not work currently or in the past and what could work in the present and future.
Going from our proposal to a full draft took a lot of writing, reading, and conversation. We learned a lot. We got words into documents and then revised them. We tried out ideas with friends and colleagues. We finished the full draft manuscript in July 2024.
This is a bit of the back story of what will be released in full in June. I’ll be sharing more about the book in the coming months ahead of the release.
Sanctifying Suburbia reviewed in Review of Religious Research, The Anxious Bench year end best books
My book Sanctifying Suburbia has recently been reviewed in two places. First, in the academic journal Review of Religious Research, Jennifer O. Laderi of Baylor University writes:
Through meticulous research, he convincingly demonstrates that the convergence of evangelicalism and suburbia was not accidental, but the result of complex social, racial, economic, and theological forces that have shaped both evangelicalism and suburban life in America since World War II.
Second, historian Joey Cochran includes Sanctifying Suburbia in his “Best Books of 2025” at The Anxious Bench blog. Cochran describes the book this way:
This book examines Chicago case studies related to white evangelical flight in the twentieth-century and astutely describes the phenomena of white evangelical suburbia. Carefully cited research and meticulous analysis of data found only in this study makes Miller’s study a vital one to consult for both historians and sociologists.
Thank you to both scholars for taking the time to read the book and consider its argument.
New publication – Finding Congregations through Online Searches: Possibilities and Perils
Review of Religious Research just published online a research note I wrote titled “Finding Congregations through Online Searches: Possibilities and Perils.” This comes out of research I have been conducting the last few years looking for religious congregations in the suburbs. With all the congregations with online presences, whether on social media or on websites or in online directories, what can researchers learn? Here is the abstract for the article:
Many religious congregations are active online and people seek out congregations online but existing research is less clear about whether all congregations within a geographic area are discoverable through online searches and what information about congregations is available online. Searching for congregations in a large suburban county on five online platforms – three directories (YellowPages.com, Yelp.com, ChurchFinder.com) and two social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram) – revealed over 700 congregations. The counts showed similarities and differences for certain religious groups compared to the 2020 U.S. Religion Census. It is difficult to have certainty regarding obtaining a complete population of congregations in this county given the ambiguity of some online information and the possible number of congregations not online. Of congregations found online, the different platforms enable researchers to examine locations, buildings, images, posts, links, activities, and interactions with online actors. These findings point to a need for more online searching for congregations in order to study hundreds of congregations at a time, compare online search results to other methods for finding congregations, and contribute to research on congregational activity, online interactions, and closures.
I have analyzed the online presence of congregations in several works as it enables researchers to look across a large number of cases. And it provides needed insights into what congregations are doing online and offline as the worlds are more overlapping than some might imagine. Can looking at congregations online find all the congregations or tell a researcher everything about congregational activity? No, but it offers opportunities that might be hard to match with other methods and insights into the influential online realm.
Sanctifying Suburbia reviewed in Christianity Today
My book published in early 2025, Sanctifying Suburbia: How the Suburbs Became the Promised Land for American Evangelicals, was just reviewed in Christianity Today. I found two quotes from the review helpful for summing up the argument of the book and its implications. From earlier in the review:
In light of all this, it would be surprising if suburban sensibilities have not shaped evangelical faith and practice. As Miller argues, “It is not enough for researchers and pundits to consider the theological positions and political behavior of evangelicals; accounting for their spatial context is part and parcel to understanding the whole package of white evangelicalism” (italics mine).
And from a later part of the review:
Miller’s point is that the evangelical cultural toolkit appears to have been calibrated by patterns, experiences, and commitments common to suburban life. He’s careful to avoid claiming a direct, causal relationship between suburban norms and prevailing traits among evangelicals. But he makes a compelling case for drawing arrows of motive, means, and opportunity.
It should be easy enough to accept a narrower version of Miller’s thesis that suburban evangelicalism is “formed in regular moments in daily life and in interaction with the social and physical realities of the American suburbs.” It will be harder for many to accept that American evangelicalism in general is essentially suburban in its values and sensibilities…
In the aggregate, as Miller sees it, these institutions take a fundamentally suburban vision and prescribe it as an objectively Christian vision that can guide evangelical faith and practice in any environment. This doesn’t feel like a stretch to me. My own ministry experience and professional work has primarily involved churches in rural and urban environments. Pastors in both places frequently lament that the resources they rely on are clearly tuned to social realities outside their own. It’s fair to say, at minimum, that suburban sensibilities dominate American ministry materials.
Thanks to the magazine and Brandon O’Brien for reviewing the book.
Sanctifying Suburbia out early in 2025
I am looking forward to the release of my book Sanctifying Suburbia: How the Suburbs Became the Promised Land for American Evangelicals on January 14, 2025. Preorder at Oxford University Press and Amazon. Throughout the early part of this year I will be publishing posts about the argument of the book and its implications, surprising things I found while researching, and ongoing possibilities for analyzing religion and the suburbs.
Here is the description of the book:
The suburbs are home to the majority of Americans, including millions of evangelical Christians and thousands of evangelical congregations and organizations. And while American evangelicals are a potent force in society and politics, their connection to and embrace of the suburbs are rarely examined. How did white evangelicals come to see the suburbs as a promised land, home to the evangelical good life and to dense concentrations and networks of evangelical residents, churches big and small, and nonprofit organizations? This book systematically assesses how evangelicals became intertwined with the suburbs and what this means for evangelical life.
Brian Miller shows how evangelical views of race and ethnicity, social class, and gender led to anti-urban sentiment, white flight, and the pursuit of racial exclusivity-all of which has led evangelicals to make the suburbs their physical and spiritual home. At the same time, clusters of evangelical organizations were planting themselves in the suburbs, drawing evangelicals out of the cities. Through sociological analysis, case studies of multiple communities with clusters of evangelical residents, and examinations of evangelical culture, Miller shows that in order to fully understand American evangelicals we must take a deeper look at how evangelicals embraced suburbs and how the suburbs shaped them.
More to come.
Legally Sociable 