In the city with the greatest number of theological schools in America, the neighborhood with the biggest fraction of these is Hyde Park. Besides the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, it is home to five of the eleven members of the Association of Chicago Theological Seminary (ACTS), a consortium of seminaries whose students can cross-register and share academic resources. Within ACTS, the Hyde Park Cluster of Theological Schools forms an even closer community, fostering collaboration and dialogue among its six member schools. Hyde Park may be dominated by the UofC in terms of educational institutions, but its theological seminaries deserve just as much renown.

In the coming years, though, the neighborhood’s high concentration of seminaries will drop, as two of them move a few blocks south to the community of Woodlawn. The Meadville Lombard Theological School plans to move to 62nd Street and Ellis Avenue in 2011, and the Chicago Theological Seminary (CTS) will relocate to 60th Street and Dorchester Avenue in 2012. Read the rest of this entry »

No matter how cold it gets outside, the lecture room on Rosenwald’s fourth floor exudes warmth. Sofas lean against wood-paneled walls, and the light is always soft and welcoming. Outside, the hallway is lit by halogen, and the bright white walls always seem strange and austere. Before his reading last Thursday, poet August Kleinzahler paced the bright hallway, while his audience—mostly students and faculty in the University of Chicago English Department, who chattered about their current work, or lack thereof—waited for him to begin. Read the rest of this entry »

Chicago’s first elevated train went into operation in 1892, and since then the system has been constantly shifting. Today, few remember how it looked at its peak, before the formation of the CTA in 1947 out of the privately owned Chicago Rapid Transit Company and Chicago Surface Lines. Since the consolidation, the CTA’s rail network has declined from a high of 227 stations to only 144. Today, however, the tide is turning the other way: although the CTA’s economic difficulties led to the recently announced fare hike, capital projects, like new facilities, stations, and tracks, are often eligible for millions of dollars in funds from the federal government. With Olympic hopes on the horizon, environmental concerns and volatile gas prices driving people out of their cars, and the city once again seeing positive population growth, now is a good time to take a look at a few ways our transit system might expand in the near future. Read the rest of this entry »

Between the struggling economy, the threat of global warming, and the growing desire to know exactly what goes into our food, it’s a good time to get back to basics. Last spring, Hyde Park resident Pam Birnie began turning her backyard into a highly productive vegetable garden. With no real experience at gardening, Birnie and her husband Rori cut out large swaths of the lawn, filling in topsoil mounds to plant a number of different vegetables. They grew everything from asparagus to zucchini, including eggplants, lettuce, cucumbers, and carrots. Throughout the spring, summer, and fall they reaped the benefits with meals of heirloom tomatoes and a variety of peppers. “There is nothing as tasty as vegetables still warm from the sun,” Birnie says.

After reading “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver, Camille Kingsolver, and Steven L. Hopp, Birnie was astounded by the dirty secrets of our food production and transportation. With some vegetables hailing from as far away as New Zealand and Chile, the amount of energy used to transport most foods from farm to market is shocking. Read the rest of this entry »

The game of squash generally evokes images of the cucumber-sandwich-eating East Coast elite. But on any given weekday afternoon, a group of fifty inner-city public school children gather to swing their racquets on the courts of the University of Chicago’s Henry Crown Field House. Read the rest of this entry »

“We’re having a sit-in, yo!”

The statement wasn’t exactly necessary. Judging by the excess of signs with slogans like “Worker Power” and “We Demand a Fair Contract,” it was immediately obvious that some sort of protest was taking place. But in lieu of angry fist-raising, the fifteen or so students gathered on the floor of the University of Chicago’s Bartlett Hall lobby lounged around, singing songs of solidarity to the tune of “Glory, Glory Hallelujah” and playing board games. In their defense, it wasn’t any old board game: it was “Power Grid,” a German game with the objective of powering the most U.S. power plants. Even in recreation, these students aim to help society. Read the rest of this entry »

“Every single play I direct brings up the question—why do we do plays?” says Anne Bogart, the founder of New York’s SITI theater company. “Radio Macbeth,” the company’s work now showing at Court Theatre, is no exception. Set in the 1940s, the play follows an ensemble of actors rehearsing for a radio performance of “Macbeth” in an empty theater. With multiple layers of performance going on throughout the play, the question arises as to what exactly the audience is watching: a performance of “Macbeth,” a performance of a company performing “Macbeth,” or a performance of the inner workings of the SITI ensemble on top of these other layers. Is it about Shakespeare’s famous work, or the experience of being an actor? Read the rest of this entry »

Reminding us that Barack Obama once dismissed Bill Ayers as just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” the Weekly Standard last June asked what kind of a person lives in a neighborhood like that. The Washington Post’s coverage of Hyde Park celebrates the proximity of an Aveda salon “only steps” from a payday loans franchise. And in a video debate on the New York Times’ website, a pooh-poohing Eli Lake wonders how many hacky sack stores the neighborhood supports.
Is that really our Hyde Park they’re talking about? Drum circles, organic gardens on every corner, munificent racial tolerance, and, as the Standard put it, “‘cranky old domestic terrorists wandering through the yard’”? Read the rest of this entry »