Although rhetoric about cities often focuses on instances of injustice, suffering, and alienation from the natural world, urban communities also host spaces of healing and flourishing in relation to broader natural and social ecosystems. The papers in this session include an analysis of a fitness gym in San Diego as an urban space of healing and communal flourishing, a proposal for an eco-theology of water rooted in Javanese and Balinese traditions, and a feminist examination of a roadside shrine in Ahmedabad, India as a site of maternal care grounded in healing and everyday protection.
This paper examines a strength training and functional fitness gym located in Hillcrest, the LGBTQ+ district of San Diego, as an urban space of healing and communal flourishing. Drawing on practical and pastoral theology and informed by participant-observation, it argues that community-based gyms within marginalized neighborhoods can function as sites of embodied ritual that cultivate belonging, activism, and mutual care. As Nancy Ammerman suggests, spirituality often emerges through embodied practices enacted in everyday life. This paper explores how the gym became a site of collective healing following one member’s traumatic brain injury after a car accident. Through group chats, weightlifting, and coordinated activism, members formed bonds of trust and solidarity, using physical training to metabolize trauma and sustain fundraising efforts. Engaging the work of Sally R. Munt and Nancy Ammerman, this paper positions the gym as a space of spiritual formation and urban religious life beyond traditional sacred institutions.
What do an Eastern Orthodox, a Javanese mystic, and a Balinese Hindu have in common? They believe that water is more than just H₂O. This paper argues that Indonesia's water crisis is not only political or economic but also theological: a neglect of "cosmological integration" between the sacred and the profane. While consecrated water in ritual is protected, natural water flowing through rivers and canals is treated as disposable. This is not merely a secular vs. religious problem: both utilitarian and urban/metropolitan religious approaches reduce water as a neutral resource, confining its moral protection to only within temples, mosques, or churches. Through comparative religion and philosophical theology, I propose an eco-theology of water rooted in Javanese and Balinese traditions, highlighting three dimensions—ontological, covenantal, and liturgical—that restore spiritual and moral significance to water and offer tools for creation care beyond doctrinal boundaries.
Roadside shrines of healing saints in Indian cities, though often appearing random and barely noticeable, are sustained through the constant attention and care of devotees. At one such shrine in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, the space is widely trusted as a healing center, particularly by mothers who bring toddlers for routine check-ups when they suspect their child may be affected by nazar, or the evil eye. This paper examines informal shrines as sites of maternal care grounded in healing and everyday protection. Drawing on feminist literature, I argue that mothering here operates not simply as a biological role but as a collective healing practice shared among mothers, priests, and the saint invoked for protection. Rituals to remove nazar, which include burning chilies, spreading salt, applying kohl, and tying protective bands, also reflect maternal vigilance over children’s vulnerability. The anonymity and diversity of urban landscape do not guarantee safety, and that is where these modest, homely shrines become alternative spaces of healing and protection. In this paper, I aim to intervene in feminist literature to study informal healing sites as gendered infrastructures of care.