David Gibson passes along this interview with Craig Bartholomew, a Christian philosopher who claims that American Christians have forgotten that in order to thrive spiritually, we have to be rooted in a place. Excerpt:

Is the renewed interest in spiritual formation, the spiritual disciplines, or liturgical practices related to our knowing there’s a crisis of place?

Absolutely. And there are so many ways you can point this out. In the book, I note that if you want to take place seriously, you have to slow down. You have to learn to be still and attentive. Because slowness, waiting, and stillness are fundamental to the practice of Christian spirituality.

As an academic, it is easier for me to read about spirituality but spirituality is about practice—habitual practice is the formative part. The father of monasticism, Benedict, said that placial stability is important. To grow really deeply into Christ, you need to stay in one place.

What spiritual disciplines would serve to keep a Christian community more aware of and connected to their neighborhood?

Take time to stand and stare. We are in a situation where people do not see their house or their neighborhood because those are things we pass through. If you want to learn about your neighborhood, take a walk around it. Most suburban developments are not designed for walkers. We continue to build huge box houses—ironically a meter from one another but don’t facilitate community—people open the garage and go into the house where they are sealed off from the rest of the world.

Pay attention to your house as a home and ask how you can develop it to promote the flourishing of its occupants. For example, pay attention to the interior décor—where the TV is placed, the colors, the artwork, and so on. Have a good look at your garden. Is it full of pesticide with the immaculate lawn, or is it a place of tranquility for humans, plants, and animals, with porous borders that enclose and yet open out onto your neighborhood?

The challenge of placemaking today should not be underestimated. We are at war against ourselves as my friend, engineer Bill Vanderburg, points out in his recent book (Our War on Ourselves: Rethinking Science, Technology, and Economic Growth). The very things we aspire to—the big suburban plots, the double garage, the two cars—the goals of middle-class life are easily the very things that get in the way of human flourishing.

One big thing I’m learning as I work on this book about my late sister and the place she lived, and where I grew up (but left), is the strengths and weaknesses of our very different approaches to the idea of Place. Ruthie was wholly committed to this place, a commitment that emerged from her entire way of looking at the world. I’ve come to see her mind as Confucian, in the sense that she had a very strong belief that the world was structured a certain way, and that duty compels us to make choices narrowly constricted by our prescribed loyalties. This was the source of her profound stability — but also a weakness, because the depth of her commitment was such that she couldn’t imagine things being any other way.

I, on the other hand, have always been highly restless, and not just in terms of moving house, in the standard American middle class way. I’ve been philosophically and religiously restless too, driven by an almost insatiable curiosity. This, I think, has been a source of strength in many ways, but also of weakness. I don’t think Ruthie’s way was the right way in every respect, but anyone who has followed my work, at least since “Crunchy Cons,” will know that I have deeply longed for more of what came naturally to her.

Of course for most of us it isn’t a question of Either/Or — either Rod’s way or Ruthie’s way. In the book, you’ll meet Abby, one of Ruthie’s closest friends, who has a restless curiosity a lot like my own, but who is also rooted in this place, where she grew up and where she works as a school administrator. One thing my sister did not appreciate, I believe, is how much easier it was for her to choose to stay in this place because of her teaching vocation. In our town, the major employers are the nuclear power plant and the school system. If you don’t work at either place, then you have significant challenges in putting roots down here. It can be done, but it’s harder. I’m hearing from others in town that the cost of land around here has risen so far, so fast, that it’s becoming even more difficult for younger generations to return to the place they called home.

All of which is to say that there are material reasons that compel us to be restless, even when we might prefer to stay in place somewhere. I completely endorse what Prof. Bartholomew is saying, and would only add that the Christian critique of rootlessness cannot avoid entailing a critique of an economic system and way of life that is premised on the fungibility of labor and capital. That is, capitalism as it is practiced in our country demands employees who have no commitment to place. The “creative destruction” lauded by capitalism’s cheerleaders includes the destruction of one’s roots, and even of the possibility of setting down roots. If Christians want people to be able to create environments in which they and their families can flourish, we need to address these fundamental issues with our economic model.

Fortunately, as I’m finding, technology makes it possible for people like me to move back to our home places, or to stay in place. David Gibson, who sent me the link, works as a journalist from his home. Here in my town, I’ve met a financial manager who lives here and connects to his office far away. The ability of my family to stay here in the long run depends entirely on my ability to work online. I think this is going to be more and more the case across the country. I would support a federal program to extend broadband service as thoroughly as possible throughout the country, on the same principle as the government once supported rural electrification.

UPDATE: From an interesting essay about home and homesickness, by Jessa Crispin:

Homesickness is not just about missing your people and a more familiar home. It can be a desperate need to stop thinking about every tiny little goddamn thing. It’s a complex algebra, substituting for every variable. I remember doing quite well with my move to Berlin for the first two weeks. And then I had to buy fabric softener. I was faced with an aisle filled with completely unfamiliar fabric softeners, and I had no default brand to fall back on. Two weeks of making decisions like this, decisions that had been unconscious for so long but now had to be reconsidered and reweighed because you’re establishing the unconscious patterns that will last for years to come and what if you get it wrong, had left me exhausted and fragile. I left without fabric softener and went back to my apartment and cried.

That makes sense to me! When I moved to New York City, it took a lot out of me, having to learn a new way of doing things. But it was a fun challenge too. I was 31 years old. I was 43 when we moved to Philadelphia from Dallas, and though it was in most respects an easy move — it was nowhere near as challenging as moving to NYC — having to learn new places and new ways was no longer fun, but draining. Age has made me far less flexible.

On the overall question of place, I was thinking just now about how relative all of this is, and has to be. My sister missed the mark by thinking of commitment to place as an absolute good, instead of a relative good. In my last job, I had to put my writing career on hiatus, which turned out to have been one of the most emotionally, spiritually, and psychologically difficult things I’ve ever done. I learned from that experience that writing is such an essential part of my identity, and how I find meaning in life, that to not be able to write is very, very hard to live with. I could do it if I had to, but at tremendous cost to my own sense of self. It was a useful thing to learn about myself. If I could not support myself as a writer here, or in any other place, but could do that somewhere else, then I would, under most conditions, move. It might sound strange, but writing means so much to me that if I were unable to write in a particular place, I would be like a gay person who had to remain closeted in his particular place. Perhaps one could exist decently enough, but one couldn’t really thrive.

Now, it could be the case that the writer is not so attached to writing, and is so attached to staying in a particular place, that he’s willing to make that sacrifice. It could also be true for the closeted gay person living in a particular place (in fact, I know that has been the case for some people I know). It’s all a matter of trading off. I don’t think my sister could have been happy in most other places. She loved this place, her home, in her marrow. You could have paid her ten times her salary here to move away, and she would have refused, because this place was her life. You could pay me 10 times what I make now to give up writing, and I wouldn’t do it, because writing is my life, and to move away from it would make me “homesick” in a way I would find intolerable. This I know from recent experience.