The Intimate Solidarities of Religion in the City

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn responding to van der Veer's magisterially broad analysis, I urge greater emphasis on those aspects of religion in the city that reflect the more intimate concerns of its citizens, especially where their religiosity appears in the form of domestic spatial organization and of everyday sin and its recognition, rather than of strict doctrinal practice. I also suggest that urbanists’ utopian visions might be better characterized as cosmological rather than as more narrowly religious, thereby permitting more productive comparison between those visions and everyday experience. In agreeing with van der Veer’s description of modern Asian cities as “protestant”, I suggest that their protestantism is not necessarily of primarily Christian inspiration; urban conditions encourage interest in religious reform as people grapple with the scalar aspect of his perspective.