BEYOND HOMELESSNESS: CHRISTIAN FAITH IN A CULTURE OF DISPLACEMENT .

By Steven Bouma-Prediger

and Brian J. Walsh. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. Pp. xvi + 361. $24.00 (paper).

This book is a stunning feat of orchestration. Indeed, precisely because it defies the neat, tidy

boundaries of genres and disciplines, one might worry that it could fall through the cracks when,

in fact, it deserves wide attention and readership. It is at once a cultural diagnosis and a

theological prescription—both a prophetic critique and constructive alternate vision—which

“reads” both our present and the biblical story through the metaphor of “home.” On this telling

of the story, God is a hospitable, homemaking Creator who makes room for humanity in

creation. Humanity’s despoiling of place, and subsequent tendency toward various forms of

displacement and homelessness, ends in the twin consequences of imperial hubris and exile.

And yet it is also in exile that the people of God begin to get a glimpse of covenantal

homemaking that is not to be confused with possession and property. In the midst of this, Jesus

comes and pitches his tent among us as the embodiment of a homemaking God who is inviting

us to a gardened city. This brief summary does not begin to do justice to the book’s scope and

erudition. Part cultural analysis, part biblical meditation, part sociological diagnosis, part

theological critique, part ecological program, part agrarian manifesto, the book nonetheless has a

solid integrity that does not feel at all scattered. It’s nothing short of a compressed, winsome

articulation of the Gospel in the language of “home.” While it is rooted in deep, solid

scholarship (privileged conversation partners include Walter Brueggemann, N.T. Wright,

Wendell Berry, and Bruce Cockburn), it is also written in a way that should be easily accessible

to undergraduate students and general audiences (no small feat), drawing on case studies,

anecdotes, song lyrics, and all sorts of stories. Strung throughout the book are a series of biblical
interludes on the themes of home, homemaking, covenant, and empire which constitute a book

within the book—a miniature biblical theology. As both theology and Christian communities

become increasingly attentive to issues of place, parish, and built environment, this book is

indispensible reading.

JAMES K.A. SMITH

Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI