“Where Can We Find Ourselves?” : Homelessness, Spirituality, and the Question of God

Abstract

This article asks what spirituality is like for young adults living on the streets of Seattle. It is based on more than five years of ethnographic fieldwork and is, as J. Derrick Lemons put it, “a theologically engaged anthropology” (Lemons, 2018). I demonstrate that, on the streets, spirituality is about cultivating a life worth living in an almost unlivable local world; tending the social wounds penetrating people soul deep; and connecting to Something that offers a power and purpose for living—while rejecting what is experientially otherwise. This article also demonstrates that the Christian conception of God usually fails to resonate on the streets because of the unloving social conditions that homelessness exemplifies. With the disappointments and possibilities of Christian love in mind, I conclude by imagining a new classroom within the school of Christian anthropology that (i) archives diverse practices of Christian love throughout space and time and (ii) cocreates agapeic ethnographies to help transform the unloving social conditions of everyday life.