When ‘Place’ Disappears: The Urban Poor, Social Transience, and Church Remoteness

Dr. R. Drew Smith will be at Louisville Seminary to deliver the lecture in person with an option for remote participants to join virtually. Registration is required whether attending in-person or online.

About the Lecture

The lecture draws attention to the significance of place, understood here to include physical and social location, positionality and purpose, and a state of being and belonging. Within contemporary societies consumed by commodification and objectification, the achievement of meaningful place is as imperative as it is imperiled—with those less formally buffered from societal distortions and disruptions of their efforts to achieve vitality and wholeness being especially susceptible to dis-placement and placelessness. The lecture focuses on the urban poor’s residential transience and instabilities, the social and psychic disorientations resulting from this, and urban poor strivings to prevail against exceptional societal resistance to their empowerment and flourishing. With these social, moral, and spiritual urgencies in mind, church responsiveness to these urgencies is examined as well, regarding the extent to which churches have resourced the urban poor’s social and spiritual placemaking pursuits or, instead, left them to discern those pathways on their own.

In addition to being an accomplished writer, editor, teacher, preacher, and scholar, Dr. Smith is a Louisville Institute Project Grant for Researchers Awardee (2012). Prior to the lecture, join us from 5:00-6:00 pm, in the Winn Center lobby for a light reception hosted by Louisville Institute, a Lilly Endowment Inc. funded grant based at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

View printable pdf.

About Dr. R. Drew Smith

R. Drew Smith is a political scientist and clergyman whose leadership and scholarship have been positioned at intersections of faith, social witness, and community engagement. He has focused on public sector and faith sector responses to spiritual, social developmental, economic, educational, racial justice, and public health urgencies facing urban communities across the U.S. and in several African contexts.

Currently Dr. Smith is the Henry L. Hillman Professor of Urban Ministry at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and also served as director of its Metro-Urban Institute. He currently serves as well as a visiting research professor in the Institute of Gender Studies at University of South Africa. In addition, he is co-convener of the Transatlantic Roundtable on Religion and Race, a network of scholars and community leaders focusing on intersections of religion, race, and social life across the transatlantic region.

He held faculty appointments previously at Indiana University and Butler University; and held visiting faculty appointments at Case Western Reserve University, University of Virginia, Emory University, and as a Fulbright professor at University of Pretoria in South Africa and Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Cameroon. Additionally, he served as the inaugural Scholar-in-Residence at the Morehouse College Leadership Center, and as the Director of the Center for the Church and Black Experience at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.

Dr. Smith was ordained within the Baptist denomination in 1988 and has ministered in multiple capacities and in numerous contexts, including on the ministry staff of congregations in Harlem, NY, Hartford, CT, Trenton, NJ, and as co-pastor of a congregation in Indianapolis, IN. Moreover, he has served in prison ministries, campus ministries, and ministries to unchurched youth, drawing on his musical training in a number of these settings, including as pianist and director for church choirs and for the Indiana University, Yale University, and New Jersey State Prison gospel choirs.

Dr. Smith earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Education from Indiana University, a Master of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University. He has published widely on religion and public life, having edited eleven books and having served as guest editor for five special themed issues of academic journals. He also has published more than 90 articles, chapters, essays, and research reports. Key aspects of his research have been generously supported by funders such as Pew Charitable Trusts, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, and Ford Foundation.

He has received many honors and awards for his academic leadership, including selection in 2002 as an Emerging Leaders Fellow by a Duke University/University of Cape Town program on Leadership and Public Values, and selection in 2008 by the Governor of Indiana for a Governor’s Black Expo Leadership award.

About the Greenhoe Lecture

The Greenhoe Lectures were established in 1966 by Memorial Presbyterian Church in Midland, Michigan, in honor of their former pastor, Dr. Theodore M. Greenhoe. Dr. Greenhoe was a member of the Louisville Seminary class of 1934. View prior lectures here.

*This event may be photographed and/or recorded. By registering and participating, you understand that your image may be included in the recorded video or still photography, and you consent to this and its use in any and all media throughout Louisville Seminary and its partners.

When ‘Place’ Disappears: The Urban Poor, Social Transience, and Church Remoteness

2025-26 Greenhoe Hybrid Lecture presented by Dr. R. Drew Smith