THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN CHICAGO. By Wilbur Zelinsky and Stephen A. Matthews

THE PLACE OF RELIGION IN CHICAGO. By WILBUR ZELINSKY and STEPHEN A. MATTHEWS. xii and 315 pp.; maps, diagrs., ills., bibliog., index. Chicago: Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press, 2011. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN: 9781935195153. Asking, "What is the place of religion in the American metropolis today?" (p. 3), Wilbur Zelinsky and Stephen Matthews take their reader on a whirlwind tour of Chicago's sacred landscapes. Armed with data, enriched with spatial analyses, and amply supplemented with maps and photographs, this is a rich resource on Chicago and the contemporary religious landscape. Zelinsky, who mapped the distribution of religious denominations at the national scale back in 1961, now gives us this ground-breaking work at the intersection of religion and urban life. This book's many treasures are a testament to a native son's love for his city and its people. Although both academic and general audiences interested in Chicago will receive the volume warmly, the very selection of Chicago, the birthplace of urban structure models, makes this study ideal for drawing broader generalizations about the place of religion in the American city. -Given the cultural significance of religion, that the authors devoted a significant number of pages to justifying their study is puzzling. They begin with a thorough literature survey, taking pains to demonstrate the neglect of religion in most scholarship on cities or the built environment. For example, although urban geography is arguably the most active subfield of human geography, in a survey of eighteen general urban geography texts or monographs they found just two references to religion, both tangential to the study of North American cities. Unfortunately, scholarship in the geography of religion has tended to overlook the city as well, favoring particular scales of analysis such as sacred sites or national maps of denominational affiliation. This raises the question of whether the geographical literature's relative silence on urban religion is due to the lack of census data on religion or evidence that secularization theory has held sway over the social-scientific imagination. Zelinsky and Matthews address the lack of data on religion at the intraurban scale with an extensive fieldwork project that is reminiscent of the pioneering work of H. Paul Douglass' 1926 1,000 City Churches. The heart of this book is an unprecedented database on the material manifestations of religion in Cook County, Illinois, encompassing Chicago and a wide range of suburbs. Beginning with a commercially available roster of congregations, Zelinsky worked full time for more than three years attempting to locate and document every functioning church, temple, synagogue, and mosque in Cook County as well as cemeteries, religious bookstores, and parochial schools. In the field he recorded the outwardly visible characteristics of structures and their neighborhood setting, including architectural style, year of construction, physical condition, block coverage, and the presence of features such as flags, steeples, and statuary. Many of the findings are not unexpected. Cook County contains nearly 5,000 documented houses of worship, yet Chicago's commercial skyline dwarfs them. On the other hand, at the neighborhood scale, many religious structures, notably suburban Wilmette's Baha'i Temple and northwest Chicago's Saint Stanislaus Kotka Catholic parish, are dominant. Of all denominations, Roman Catholic places of worship were most likely to dominate an entire city block. With their elaborate complexes of sanctuaries, social halls, parochial schools, athletic fields, and residences for clergy and teachers, urban Catholics have created what John McGreevy, in his 1996 Parish Boundaries, called a "parish civilization." Catholics stood out in other ways: the greatest number of adherents, the most houses of worship, and the broadest geographical coverage. …