The Conference

The conference will explore how urban life and ministry are impacted by and also impact globalization in economic, political, cultural, and religious terms. The goals of the conference are to strengthen the capacities of religious leaders and the wider communities they serve to:

• Understand the interrelated processes of globalization and urbanization. More specifically, to be able to analyze the mutual impact of urbanization and globalization in the everyday lives of urban/metropolitan congregations and their communities.


• Be better able to interpret theologically and ethically the issues of justice and care, integrity and sustainability, and eco-human well-being and flourishing that emerge in these urban-global networks.


• Learn how to become more faithful and effective agents of transformation within the wider global urban world. A key issue is to explore the significance of religious agency in this nexus.

The conference brings together a significant number of speakers and other participants who articulate varying and sometimes conflicting views, interests, and values in terms that will make them amenable to constructive discourse and a mutual commitment to seek a just resolution. Equally important will be to give voice to groups so often silenced in these conversations, especially those most vulnerable to the harmful effects of globalization.

The conference will explore how globalization contributes to the violation of ecological and human well-being and, under what conditions, globalization contributes—or could contribute—to earth-human flourishing and justice for all. We will identify the contributions of local and global actors to justice, well-being, and sustainability.

The conference will spark imagination that leads to collaborative approaches to action, by demonstrating practices and partnerships that both historically or currently have offered the opportunity to make a difference in local communities. Through panel discussions and workshops, we will seek to demonstrate capacities for partnerships among diverse stakeholders in this work. We will provide resources and strategies for care and justice on various issues of globalization for conference participants to take back to their own churches, communities, and organizations. Our goal is to energize participants for the journey ahead in local and global contexts.

About Globalization

Globalization may, to paraphrase Archbishop Temple, be the “great new fact of our era.” The compression of time and space (thanks to the innovations of the technologies of communication), the intensification of diversity and difference, the integration of all the world’s economies, and the ever-accelerating pace of change are bringing far-reaching transformations to every aspect of life. Globalization has always been fraught with ambiguities. On the one hand, it has brought about a greater sense of interconnectedness and a greater degree of social and economic access while promising growing democracy and freedom. On the other, it has intensified divisions, amplified disparities between rich and poor, fostered increased violence, and accelerated the global environmental crisis. Today, we are witnessing one cost of interconnectedness: failed economies in one sector threaten the well-being of economies worldwide.

Globalization has its supporters. The most vociferous of them have often been identified as those who praise without reservations the workings of a free-market economy and capitalism. There have also been critics, including many who offer alternative views concerning localization, “glocalization,” and mundialización. Whether one is for it or against it, embraces it or resists it, globalization is here to stay, everywhere extending its impact, and ever changing.

Globalization is a central but also contested dynamic/structure of our world—and it is inextricably linked to urbanization. It has been so for millennia. Long before the word “globalization” was invented, cities were centers of intense global aspirations and activity. The standard accounts of globalization often refer to the extensity of global networks, the intensity of global interconnectedness, the velocity of global flows, and the impact of this global interconnectedness on people throughout the world (David Held and others). These descriptions can also be applied to cities. Cities were and are nodes of various interlocking global networks, passageways through which globalization flows. Saskia Sassen also argues for the significance of place in the work of globalization. Cities are places (control centers) where the work of globalization gets done through complex infrastructures of highly paid professionals and low-wage support service workers. This is especially true of those cities that Sassen and others call “global cities,” one of which is New York. Exploring globalization in New York City offers an opportunity to examine it from one of its epicenters.

Globalization has many dimensions: economic (money, markets, and migration), political, military, environmental, cultural, and religious. Globalization’s significance for religious faith and practice—and for the exercise of urban ministry—has been largely ignored. The heart of this conference is to both acknowledge and strengthen the capacities of religious leaders and ordinary people of faith to understand the contested arguments about the urban-global context in which we live, to interpret this context theologically as a justice issue, and to return home with energy and ideas about acting with others to “change the world.”

About NYTS

New York Theological Seminary, founded in 1901 and formerly known as the Biblical Seminary in New York, is a non-denominational urban center for theological education with more than 525 students working in partnership with churches throughout the metropolitan area. Its student body is one of the most diverse in the nation today, and its programs are offered at a variety of academic levels in order to provide resources for ministry. NYTS offers programs to prepare men and women for effective service in church and society in parish ministry and other vital ministries such as chaplaincy, social policy advocacy, and community organizing. NYTS offers programs in several languages, at different educational levels, and at multiple locations. The Seminary shares with its constituencies a fundamental commitment to the transformative power of the Word of God and, in light of this commitment and in keeping with its history as the Biblical Seminary of New York, the Bible is at the center of the Seminary’s curriculum and devotional life. NYTS is the only seminary in the nation primarily dedicated to preparing and supporting clergy and laity for inner-city ministry.

Since the 1970s, NYTS has developed a mode of theological education in which the Seminary is closely involved with the churches from which its students come and in which they serve as graduates. As a result, the Seminary both learns from the congregations, and contributes to the congregations through both students and faculty. This enables NYTS to be a resource to other seminaries—those without direct involvement with the churches of New York or any city--who wish to use New York as a “learning laboratory” for their own ministry students.

NYTS, long known for its mission of training religious leaders for ministry in urban settings, is poised at the beginning of a new period of growth and opportunity. The Seminary is dramatically expanding and increasing its programs of training for ministry, with new interdisciplinary programs and centers including the Center for the Study and Practice of Urban Religion; the Center for World Christianity; and the Center’s Globalization Project, which is sponsoring the upcoming Conference, Religion in the Global City: Faith, Justice, Action.