Approximately 20 members of the Boston University community gathered early Wednesday afternoon for a panel, “Faith and the City,” to discuss the role of religion in modern cities.
The seminar, moderated by Dean of Marsh Chapel Robert Hill, was the last Urban Seminar held by the Initiatives on Cities this semester.
Graham Wilson, director of the Initiative on Cities, wrote in an email to The Daily Free Press prior to the discussion that he brought three different and influential religious leaders together to try to capture the religion diversity of Boston.
“We wanted a range of faith organizations from different traditions with different resources and different roles,” Wilson wrote. “Boston is home to a wonderfully diverse community and we wanted to reflect that diversity.”
Religion centers often undertake a wide range of social and charitable work for their members and for the broader community, but not many people know about this work, Wilson wrote.
“We want to highlight that faith organizations — in addition to their spiritual work — have never limited themselves to that,” Wilson wrote. “They are dynamic leaders for all kinds of populations, especially in cities when their work can be very impactful.”
Despite the positive work that religion groups bring to cities, much of the discussion centered on the challenge of trying to maintain a congregation with rising expenses and decreasing community involvement.
Panelist Rev. Theodore Hickman-Maynard, a visiting professor in the School of Theology, said church attendance has decreased dramatically in the United States over the past several decades.
“While the black community is still at the center of the black church, the black church is no longer at the center of the black community,” Hickman-Maynard said. “We’re still primarily a Christian nation. We are just becoming an increasingly churchless nation.”
The second panelist, Shaykh Yasir Fahmy of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, addressed the struggle of trying to maintain a religious center in the modern world.
“It’s hard to maintain relevance with the changing and shifting society,” Fahmy said. “You’ve always got to try and keep up with the really quickly moving modernity.”
The final panelist, Rev. Rainey Dankel of Trinity Church, said that urban churches have a unique obligation to think about race and discrimination.
“When looking for a church, I particularly wanted a church in an urban area because I thought it would be the best use of my experiences,” Dankel said. “Part of that I think right now is becoming much more aware of white privilege and race, and I have to say now more than ever we need that conversation out in the atmosphere.”
Wilson concluded the discussion by addressing the unique role of universities in the discussion on faith and cities.
“Universities are pretty secular minded places,” Wilson said. “Perhaps people will have a greater sense of the role of religious organizations and awareness of volunteer opportunities through them.”
Several students said after the discussion that they appreciated the university’s effort to host this panel — Ramya Ravindrababu, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, said she came to the discussion because it demonstrated an intersectionality of her interests in urban politics and in faith.
“Something really important to me is community building in cities, and such a big part of that for so many people is based in faith,” Ravindrababu said. “In a city like Boston that historically has such a prominent Catholic population … you look at where we are today and that is still true to a certain extent, but definitely not the level that it was. I’m just wondering where that broke down and how faith functions as a part of city life today.”
Max Xue, a first-year graduate student in STH, said he came to the panel because of its relevance to the research that he is conducting.
“It was really good, I learned a lot,” Xue said. “You don’t really get a chance to hear so many people from so many different parts of Boston and of so many different faiths all in one place.”
Meaghan Delaney, a junior in the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, said it’s especially important to bring together people with diverse backgrounds.
“There’s a lot of people in Boston that do have different faiths,” Delaney said, “and bringing all those faiths together and talking about how they function in the context on Boston is an important topic.”
