Eagle Lake

Cadillac Mountain

Chicago's Southern Soul

Chicagoans’ devotion to their city is mercifully devoid of the smugness so palpable in places like New York and San Francisco and pockets of Uptown New Orleans before the storm. There’s a sense of engagement and civic activism; people are smart without being self-consciously intellectual. By contrast Manhattan seems claustrophobic and cliquish, a place where being embraced in the way Chicago embraced Frances requires a certain amount of gamesmanship and ambition for something more than simply to do good and live a rich life.

http://gardenandgun.com/article/chicagos-southern-soul

Amen.

Second generation Reformed churches

Reformed doctrine had already shown a greater capacity to mobilize popular support than Lutheran ideas when the two were in direct competition in the cities of south Germany. Now it also offered compelling reasons for those drawn to it to separate themselves from the church of Rome. It offered a model derived from the Bible of how to form independent churches in the absence of governmental support. It was firmly ensconced in a number of enclaves that were well situated to serve as bases for wider expansion and that appeared to contemporaries to be admirable models of reformed communities. Its theologians had given expression to its basic tenets in a number of monuments of compelling exegesis. With its diversity of ecclesiologies, it could justify magisterial control of a state church as well as the formation of independent churches under the cross, making it appealing to rulers who had already assumed the supreme headship within their territories.  All of these considerations help to explain why the Reformed churches were poised for a dramatic period of expansion in 1555.

Philip Benedict, Christ's Churches Purely Reformed:  A Social History of Calvinism, 120, summarizing the second generation of the Reformed tradition.  "Churches under the cross" refers to illegal churches meeting in secret in northern Italy.

But there have always been more who began adult life as artists and intellectuals only to find themselves 25 years on somehow being mainly a teacher at a D-list college in a place they never wanted to live.

But there have always been more who began adult life as artists and intellectuals only to find themselves 25 years on somehow being mainly a teacher at a D-list college in a place they never wanted to live. 

--Garance Franke-Ruta, Everlasting Realities of the Bohemian Lifestyle

Chicago, unlike New York, has plenty of affordable housing, if you're willing to live in "up-and-coming" neighborhoods.  But my sense is that the city doesn't have a well-established intellectual class outside of Hyde Park.  Which isn't affordable.