This is similar to New Town – Saint Charles, being built in suburban Saint Louis, Missouri—on the floodplain of the huge and dangerous Missouri River. Oh, I’m sure they have the best of engineering to protect these fine new homes.

This community will also have a non-denominational chapel in its center. In the United States, the term ‘non-denominational’ has notional overtones that go from benign to sinister—in middle of the last century, the Ku Klux Klan was the major force in the non-denom movement. Nowadays we have both left- and right-wing versions of ‘emerging churches’ that are quite un-Catholic in their Christianity, but are wildly popular: these non-denom ecclesial communites are instead explicitly Post-modern.

The New Urbanism theory inspiring these new towns fails to recognize the Catholic roots of urban design and instead is based on Existentialism. I like these new communities better than the standard tract developments, but I am more comfortable with the Catholic parish neighborhoods of the City of Saint Louis.

It’s a good start, but we can do better, I think.

Best regards,

Mark S. Abeln