If you want an on-the-ground report about the decline of Detroit, in hauntingly beautiful prose, check out this article in the new Rolling Stone by Mark Benelli.
The current recession was old news in Michigan, where the
unemployment rate, at 10.6 percent, remains the highest in the
country. And Detroit itself, with its dwindling population, almost
entirely African-American after the white flight of the Sixties and
Seventies, had come more and more to resemble a prophecy of end
times. Certain neighborhoods have grown so barren, they threaten to
return to nature. The week of the auto show, the great Website
Detroitblog posted a story about a former blues singer now doing a
steady business selling raccoon meat out of his house; a few days
later, a homeless man was discovered frozen in a pool of water in
an abandoned warehouse, only his feet jutting from the ice.
Read the rest here.
It this story there is a parable of our nation. It is a humiliation, however one might judge the causes and current realities. Douglas John Hall has been our best writer on the issue of how the fires of humiliation, losing the privledge of empire both in the church and in the nation, find something deeper than power and optimism to shore us up. What is beyond power and optimism? Weakness and hope. Read a short version of Hall's view here.
anon and peace,
Chris
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