“Senator Edward Martin (R-PA) spoke for many when he declared, “America must move forward with the atomic bomb in one hand and the cross in the other.”” (14)
This is an interesting contrast for a country: military/scientific might in one hand, the cross, a religious symbol of suffering, in the other.
This reminded me of a more common quote about holding a Bible and a newspaper in separate hands. For example, this was linked to Billy Graham:
“What a moment to take the newspaper in one hand and the Bible in the other and watch the unfolding of the great drama of the ages.” Billy Graham in The Jesus Generation in 1971
“The 82-year-old preacher from Montreat, N.C., has been said to give his sermons “with a Bible in one hand and a Time magazine in the other,” says A. Larry Ross, his media director.” 2001 story in The Times-News
This quote supposedly goes back to theologian Karl Barth. It is a different contrast: the Word of God in one hand, reports of what is happening in the world in the other.
Both quotes get at similar ideas. Hands can only hold so much so what is there should be important. What a person holds in both hands can complement each other. They reflect particular eras. The quotes could apply to specific actors – America, pastors/evangelists – or to people more broadly.
What would be the updated version for American Christians in 2025?
Several times in my life I have been in warm weather locales before and after Christmas. As is true in many places in the United States, this time of year involves Christmas decorations: lights, Christmas trees, garlands, and more. I have difficulty comprehending this.
When I think of Christmas, I think of cold weather. Snow at times. Warm jackets. Hats and gloves. This is the context in which I usually see all the activities of Christmas. Christmas trees and lights go up after the temperatures have dropped and winter is near or has just begun. I grew up in and have spent most of my life in the Chicago area where this is the norm.
We all have mental grids through which information we take in passes through. We have models of how the world works. Our experiences and understandings are influenced by our settings. What we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste around us helps inform us of the world.
When we confronted with something different compared to our understanding, it can cause us to pause. How does that work? It is possible to have Christmas and 80 degree weather? People can walk outside at Christmas in shorts and short sleeve shirts? People can go to the beach on Christmas?
If I lived in such a location, I suppose I would get used to this. It would be the way it is. Then traveling to cold and snow during Christmas would seem out of the ordinary. How do those people survive frigid air each holiday season?
In the meantime, any journey I take to warmer weather around Christmas will continue to confound me. I can enjoy it while there but it does not feel like the full holiday experience. I know Christmas in one particular setting and would need a lot more time elsewhere to alter my model of what Christmas can be.
Starting in 1848, railroads raced to make Chicago the preeminent commercial and financial crossroads between booming factories on the East Coast and voracious markets and vast natural resources in the West.
But they always found it easier and cheaper to hand their freight off to each other in and around the city than to build transcontinental railroads that actually passed through Chicago. In some yards, including near McKinley Park 4 miles southwest of downtown, Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern exchange groups of railcars. Elsewhere, they hand off individual shipping containers to each other and to different railroads.
By running a single transcontinental railroad, Union Pacific says it can shave one or two days off the full week that 40-foot shipping containers now spend traveling from Los Angeles to Chicago and then on to, say, the western suburbs of New York City…
With a unified rail network, Union Pacific hopes to eliminate hundreds of rubber-tire container moves each day in and around Chicago, and hundreds more between Chicago and surrounding Midwest cities like Detroit; Columbus, Ohio; and Louisville, Kentucky.
There must be more to this story. How much of this has to do with the history of when railroads were founded and which areas they serviced? How much of this is about the railroad industry and companies working together and/or competing? How much of this is due to policies about railroad mergers?
In many industries, the trend over time does seem to be consolidation among the more powerful actors. This might appear to occur for good reasons, such as being able to ship goods through Chicago from coast to coast on one railroad system. But, as the article notes, this then affects markets, prices, and consumers with fewer companies.
At this point, the railroad industry in the United States is nearing 200 years old (1826 might be the first year of commercial operation). This is a long history compared to numerous other commercial or industrial sectors in the United States. What would it take to truly transform the railroad industry at this point as it operates in a much different context than it did when the first companies were founded? Railroads are an important part of the infrastructure of the United States and making it 200 more years might require foresight and adaptation.
“Regardless of any particular religious tenets, certain activities are considered ‘sinful’ by society as a whole. Sometimes, these activities are always bad, like violent crimes or identity theft. In other cases, they may be relatively harmless in moderation but incredibly destructive when not kept under control, such as alcohol use or gambling. The most sinful cities are those where illicit activities and vices alike are the most widespread.” – Chip Lupo, WalletHub Analyst…
To determine the most sinful cities in America, WalletHub compared 182 cities — including the 150 most populated U.S. cities, plus at least two of the most populated cities in each state — across seven key dimensions: 1) Anger & Hatred, 2) Jealousy, 3) Excesses & Vices, 4) Greed, 5) Lust, 6) Vanity and 7) Laziness.
We examined those dimensions using 37 relevant metrics listed below with their corresponding weights. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the highest level of sinfulness.
I find intriguing the idea that sins as defined by American society are less about religious traditions and more about social constructions of sin. Where do these ideas about sin come from and who defines them? The seven categories seem like they could match up with the traditional seven deadly sins.
If Americans see a list about sins, how many connect that to a religious meaning rather than a social meaning? If Americans grow up loosely connected to religion or are not connected at all, how do they learn about sin? Perhaps sin is more like modern capitalism which sociologist Max Weber argued lost it religious motivations and meanings decades ago. Are these measures good proxies for secularized sins?
Looking at the list of cities, some would not be a surprise. Others might be. For example, a number of cities in what would be considered the Bible Belt make the top 10. There are also some cities that some Americans might assume are higher than they are (Washington, D.C., at #35 and San Francisco at #42, for two examples).
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.
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.
Quiet. It’s a nice suburb, I enjoyed it. I was homeschooled, so I had a very different experience than probably a lot of people did. My mom kept our world very big — we traveled a lot. Wheaton is where I fell in love with music. I’m grateful for the thousands of hours of sitting in my room playing guitar.
Practice is required to become skilled at many tasks. Having the time, space, and skills to practice well is helpful.
Suburban bedrooms are a private space in the American suburban home. It is a place to get away from the world. One can be alone with their thoughts. In the case of practicing music, playing guitar in a bedroom isolates the activity and noise from the rest of the house. The practicing goes unobserved.
Add to this that suburbs are sometimes portrayed as being creative wastelands. Suburbs are said to be conformist, conservative, cookie-cutter. Many narratives suggest there is a suburban facade of success and attainment – happy families, polite interactions – but just below the surface are problems and divisions.
Can suburban bedrooms produce artistic talent and creativity? The majority of Americans live in the suburbs and multiple generations have grown up in the suburbs. Presumably at least a few artists, novelists, filmmakers, playwrights, and musicians have honed their craft in the suburbs, and perhaps even in their bedrooms.
Amazon plans to spend $15 billion for the largest construction project in Indiana history, building data center campuses in Northwest Indiana and creating 1,100 new jobs, officials said…
Sites for them have not yet been finalized, although AWS is in negotiations with multiple communities, he said Monday…
Not too many years ago, BP’s $3.8 billion Whiting Refinery expansion was considered the largest construction project in state history. The work at the refinery kept tradespeople working through the Great Recession, Ennis noted. Building data centers will keep tradespeople working in the region for years to come…
This project’s impact on the communities’ tax base can’t be calculated until the communities are chosen and incentives are finalized, but the impact will be huge. When Microsoft chose LaPorte for a $1 billion data center, Mayor Tom Dermody said it would effectively double the city’s tax base.
Indiana is not the largest state in size or population but it is not the smallest either: it is 38th in land area and 17th in population. So I think it means something that this would be the largest project in the state’s history. The amount of money, work, and land is worth noting.
The article mentions briefly that some Indiana communities have said no to data centers. Others seem interested (as noted above). I wonder if data centers and less desirable land uses will cluster in red states or certain communities where they are seen more as business opportunities rather than community liabilities. If tech companies say they need data centers, presumably some places will approve their construction.
In this particular case, what if some of the data center activity that could go in the Chicago suburbs located in Illinois ends up in northwest Indiana? Will some Illinois and Indiana communities look back and think they missed an opportunity or will they be grateful they had the foresight to say no?
The airport was to be a driver and symbol of the whole region’s evolution. “Planners hope the terminal, with its vaulted ceilings and driverless underground trains, will complete an image transformation begun decades ago,” the Times story said. “Once known as a gritty old steel town of blue-collar workers, Pittsburgh has become a commercial center of office towers and high-technology industries.” That reinvention has continued apace in the 33 years since the terminal opened. But even as a tech, robotics, and health care hub, the area has three-fourths the population that it did in 1970. And no place was a worse reminder of what Pittsburgh had lost than this airport 20 minutes west of downtown…
As a major airline’s biggest hub, Pittsburgh would be taking a piece out of millions of travelers who weren’t even staying in Pittsburgh, and it would also get a tourist boom from people who suddenly had an ultra-easy way of visiting. Before Sept. 11, 2001, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported, USAir was running 542 daily flights in or out of Pittsburgh. As airline-airport relationships go, this was a huge one. (Today, for example, Delta peaks with about 330 daily flights leaving Minneapolis, its No. 2 city.)…
But the oversized airport was a bleak metaphor for a city that was once more bustling and then got let down—first by the shriveling of the steel business, then by USAir itself. The cavernous, quiet terminal created a bad feeling upon landing at home, like you had just entered a place that wasn’t what it used to be. It wasn’t a good way to be welcomed to a city, whether you lived there or not.
It can’t be overstated how much the point of the new airport is to simply move Pittsburgh past this corporate pantsing by US Airways. Yeah, there are practical logistics reasons for an update. As the airport authority chairman said in announcing the project back in 2017, airlines would face lower costs, and the facility would be “very efficient and modern.” But then he got to the point: “And, finally, this is most important for me, the people of Pittsburgh finally get an airport that is built for them, and not USAir.”…
A major city needs a decent airport. It offers travel opportunities to residents and businesses. It connects a place to other places. It is what people see when they arrive in or leave a city.
Can an airport be an economic engine on its own? Pittsburgh is a smaller big city. According to Wikipedia, it is the 67th largest city in the United States with over 307,000 residents and it is the 28th largest metropolitan area. How much air traffic can be expected to go through an airport in such a city?
The story of this airport seems tied up with the fate of the city. It once thought it could be an airline hub. It has a proud history of industry. But the world changed: industry jobs went elsewhere, the airline industry changed, and the large airport did not live up to its potential.
Having effective and inspiring infrastructure is helpful in many ways. It enables other important activity. Pittsburgh may not have a large airline hub or a standalone economic powerhouse but perhaps it now has an airport that serves the region well for decades.
Growing up in the 1990s, I and other residents of my suburb did not lack for choices when it came to shopping malls and movie theaters. While our suburb itself was not home to a theater or shopping mall, within a 10 mile drive, we could access at three shopping malls (with several more within a few more miles) and numerous smaller shopping centers and at least five first-run movie theaters and several additional second-run theaters (with more just beyond those 10 mile boundaries).
This provided lots of options. Did we want to see the latest blockbuster (with a good string of these in the mid to late 1990s) at a new 16 or 24 theater location? What kind of store – national chain, anchor department store, local business – did we want to visit at the mall and perhaps we could find food there?
This era is over. There are still shopping malls and movie theaters around. I do not lack for options if I were to look up theaters and malls near me. But, there are fewer within that ten mile radius: two of the three malls closed and multiple movie theaters closed or downsized from megaplex size.
And if I go to these places, the experience is different and the world has changed. Both are often less lively. People have more options, particularly at home. They can shop with their smartphones and computers and order goods and food right to their doorstep. They can skip theaters for movies, streaming them on their own screens. I am guilty of this as well; partly due to being in a different stage of life, partly because I have other options, I do not frequent malls and movie theaters.
Some shopping malls and movie theaters will hang on in the suburbs. They have been around for decades. They are part of the suburban landscape. They continue to offer unique experiences, even if people can shop and watch movies elsewhere. There just will not be as many of them in the future and people may have to drive a little further to find what used to be more plentiful.
Later waves that arrived just after the Great Recession, however, had a different type of migrant identity. As luxury housing continued to be built in New York City and affordable areas disappeared, some residents found the big city “inhospitable to their desired urban lifestyle and identity”: “Many of today’s newcomers to Newburgh use the term ‘priced out’…though few actually left in direct response to their rents rising or their landlord pressuring them to move out,” Ocejo writes. “But cost still played an important role in their decision to relocate…. They felt displaced from their own potential and opportunities to thrive as middle-class urbanites living a specific city lifestyle in the metropolis.”
Herein lies the tension between getting “pushed” from a city versus “pulled.” Some contemporary migrants are pushed from a particular lifestyle and pulled by a promise that it can be built elsewhere. Unlike midcentury white flight—which was highly dependent on the construction of suburban housing, racism, and statecraft—middle-class millennials (especially those facing mounting city prices and remote work) find that smaller cities and towns cater to a broader vision for life, one that provides opportunities to buy a house, build a business, or comfortably raise a family…
“When people move from one community to another…they leave behind their old job, connections, identity, and seek out new ones. They force themselves to go meet their neighbors, or to show up at a new church on Sunday, despite the awkwardness,” Appelbaum writes. What this might mean for rural or metro areas is yet to be seen. But for people moving out of large cities, it’s redefining what upward mobility might look like. Building wealth through housing may be unattainable, but it’s being replaced by a search for a new American dream: self-actualization.
What I read in this description is an intertwining of financial matters and what lifestyle people see themselves having. Costs and resources matter; housing is a sizable portion of many budgets. Housing has become more expensive in many American metropolitan areas. But cultural narratives and individual aspirations also matter; what life does someone want to live? What do they see as a good life?
On this first factor, it helps to have more financial resources. The stories told in this article seem to involve people who had enough resources that they had options of where to live. They could make a major move, perhaps by selling a residence in one place to go to another. Or they had careers and job skills that enabled them to live in multiple places.
On this second factor, Americans have developed a lot of narratives over time about desirable lives. They want a single-family home in the suburbs. They want to be individuals who pursue their own path (the self-actualization suggested above). They want to engage community life. And so on.
Perhaps then it would be helpful to think about a two-pole line that demonstrates how people make decisions about where to live and what to pursue. On one side of the line is finances and what is possible in terms of money and resources. On the other side of the line is an image of the life they want to live and what that entails on a day-to-day and long-term basis. Depending on the current situation personally and in society, they might slide a marker more toward one pole than the other.
(Does this describe how young adults make these decisions or is this limited to a certain subset with particular resources and goals?)
Legally Sociable 