The Word on the Street: Performing the Scriptures in the Urban Context by Stanley P. Saunders & Charles L. Campbell (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000)

In The Word on the Street, Chuck Campbell tells the story of taking a class to spend a night with homeless folks on the streets of Atlanta. After guiding them through the ordeal of locating sufficient cardboard to insulate them from the cold of the ground, James (one of the regulars who sleep in the backyard of the Open Door Community) quietly left the circle to return with his personal stash of doughnuts, which he broke and shared among the class. Campbell recognized this as a sacramental act. He discerned in it an emblem of the Lord's Supper.

This book is actually a series of overlapping and intersecting stories. One set concerns two seminary professors whose pedagogy involves changing the location of their classes, taking students into the city, the parks and public spaces inhabited by the homeless. Another are the stories of homeless people themselves, whose names and lives are given voice. Weaving through is also the saga of the Open Door Community, a catholic worker (small c) house founded by an activist Presbyterian couple, Ed Loring and Murphy Davis. There is also the story of Atlanta, its self-proclaimed glory, beneath which corporate powers ordain and enforce the criminalizing, invisibilizing, and scapegoating of homeless people. Where these stories interconnect or clash, the Word happens. It is there to be seen and heard.

In similar fashion this book comprises an assortment of stitched-together literary genres (like, I suppose, the scriptures themselves). The two professors contribute meditations and articles (written for the Open Door's political rag, Hospitality) along with sermons, footnoted scholarly works published in aca-demic journals and supplementary material written expressly for the book. In the cracks are black-and-white prints by Christina Bray, each itself an evocative study in streetlife. Somehow it all manages to read, if not seamlessly, at least with an utter coherence (like, I suppose, the scriptures themselves).

Since Saunders is a New Testament scholar, his contributions are largely biblical and hermeneutical. These include close readings and striking new takes on well-worn parables, hymns, and resurrection narratives. But his emphasis is on reading site -- and by that not simply social location, but actual physical placement. He tells a funny story of his class spreading out on a hot summer day in the plaza between a bank skyscraper and the park which was "home" to many poor folks. Their study? The fifth chapter of James with its devastating critique of wealth. As a student led them in an imaginative exercise of listening from the perspective of various people in the tower and the park, they were confronted by a security guard for posing some sort of threat! One of Saunders' most important contributions is a stunning analysis of how urban social architecture inscribes our hearts. It is a concise and wondrous examination of contested spaces as the locus of urban spirituality.

As a professor of preaching, Charles Campbell is struck with how the enterprise of proclamation is likewise altered by the location of the street. Whether his students are preaching good news to the homeless or to the principalities arrayed against them, they find their own voices changed and oddly freed in that placement.

All this strikes one as a new mode of public theology. And yet when Campbell rehearses a suggestive history, it seems more normative than aberration. From the prophets to Jesus, Peter and Paul, it is really the biblical mode. Add Francis, Luther, Whitefield, Wesley, or mention Abolitionism, The Great Awakening, and the Salvation Army and a recognizable tradition comes into focus. Think of recent movements: the Catholic Worker, Freedom Struggle preachers, or anti-nuclear liturgical direct action and this new mode is novel only with reference to the captivity of sanctuary and academy.

In like manner, marginal and neglected charisms such as solidarity and hospitality emerge in this volume as foundational Christian practices, discipleship disciplines embedded in baptism and eucharist, contesting the spaces of our very lives.

And that, it would seem, is the further story to be noticed: the tale of two professors whose lives get transformed by their own pedagogy. It is a story sometimes told in confession and tears, sometimes with the joy of new sight, always as gift. Let the reader understand (and beware): It is as well our own lives that are being read and told before our eyes. l

Witness contributing editor Bill Wylie-Kellermann works for Chicago's Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education (SCUPE).