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What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope? You yourself must change it. What would it feel like to know your country was changing? You yourself must change it. Though your life felt arduous new and unmapped and strange what would it mean to stand on the first page of the end of despair? (Adrienne Rich, 1986) When I was a child I was told that there were three things we never discuss in public: politics, religion, and money. As a young adult, groping for meaning in life and for meaningful work, I gravitated to the urban/city-building professions as a way of working for social justice, and found myself talking about nothing but politics and money for the next 25 years, since that’s what most urban conflicts seemed to be about. My first book, in 1975, was tellingly titled Cities for Sale, and subtitled Property, Politics and Urban Planning. Religion, on the other hand, never seemed relevant, except in so far as it motivated some individuals—myself not included—to do this social justice work. (My motivation came, and still does, from a secular humanism.) Looking back now, it’s surprising how little I knew about the faith backgrounds, or motivations, of those I’ve worked with or who’ve inspired me. It shows perhaps how well-trained we all were in keeping these matters of faith strictly in the realm of the private. And there were, or seemed to be, good reasons for this. In secular nation states, religion has been viewed as potentially divisive and thus as something that must be kept out of the realm of public policy and governance discourse.