The modern city may be where Bauman locates the new desert of modernity. To understand fully the theological implications of his claim we should rethink the modern city as a theological text in itself. What primarily activates the tourist, the traveller and exile in the contemporary western world is the experience of living in the modern city. This is because the dislocation that is experienced in the modern city appears to be a primary reason for undertaking re-location in pursuit of what is deemed lost or not present at home. Is such a re-location, however, actually due to our inability to recognize what “home” means in modernity? Does our pursuit of a located home now become a form of nostalgic, romanticized longing? Furthermore, if for Christians home is in God, then to seek a new home of locatedness elsewhere is to confuse God and place. In other words, is the rejection caused by the dislocation of modernity in favour of physical locatedness really part of a turn away from the challenge of Christianity back to a Baal of Christendom and locatedness?

In order to discuss these issues, this chapter will occur in two distinct, yet connected, parts. The first is concerned with the rise of the modern(ist) city. The city in modernity is variously that home which is not a home, that place of presence that is an absence, that location which is dislocation, that place of relocated and internalized exile.