MOTOWN MOSES.

Detroit both fascinates and repels.

I was introduced to Motown about a decade ago. I had occasion to live and work there for a year. Yet, much like most of those who claim to be from there, I didn't actually live in Detroit. I lived instead in one of its more nondescript suburbs near a Ford plant that buzzed with three shifts spewing out Escorts.

My family and I had been warned. "You don't want to live there," our Michigan friends told us in hushed warnings about their state's largest city.

I worked downtown and would tell them about various hangouts in the city I had discovered. These included a skating rink at Hart Plaza, the waterfront at Belle Isle, and the hole-in-the-wall sports bar where Yankees manager Billy Martin was said to have once punched out a marshmallow salesman, or maybe it was a relief pitcher. I might as well have told them about a trip to Siberia for all they knew--or cared--about what lurked downtown.

During my time there, the archdiocese would be torn apart by a plan to close many city parishes. That fight pitted activists quoting church documents on a liberating Jesus who professed a preferential option for the poor against church officials who warned that business-as-usual was impossible and that change had to happen. There was intense rancor laced with a heavy pall of guilt as well. Many of the middle-class activists had left the city years ago and commuted to their old parishes in the city. Detroit's abandonment cut across all kinds of lines.

As luck would have it, after a decade away, work took me back for a short visit to report on a conference.

I got there early and had time to walk around a city built on the automobile, where pedestrians remain scarce.

Media accounts note that the Detroit metro area, unlike ten years ago, is booming. Unemployment is officially down to almost zero. The SUV has revitalized the auto business beyond the wildest expectations. But that prosperity is not seen much in the city itself.

One is struck by the abandoned buildings: not only in poverty-scarred residential areas, filled with empty lots and crumbling shells that never recovered from the riots of the '60s, but also in the heart of downtown. Other cities--notably New York and Los Angeles--had riots, but few left the long-standing legacies one finds in the eerie emptiness of Detroit. Massive buildings, such as the old Cadillac Hotel, were empty ten years ago. They are still empty, nestled in the heart of a battered downtown. Old department stores are empty hulks; the shoppers prefer the malls out of town. Many of the buildings, at the time of my visit, were plastered with ominous orange signs warning the revelers of "Devil's Night"--a Halloween ritual when Detroit's abandoned buildings are set ablaze--to stay away.

Even other hard-scrabble American cities--Baltimore and its waterfront comes to mind--have little theme-park type sections filled with tourists in which urban blight can seem as far removed as it is in a typical suburban mall. Little of that facade exists in Detroit.

Still, there are signs of a fledgling revival.

Near the riverfront are imposing corporate structures. They include the massive, self-enclosed Renaissance Center, now occupied by General Motors, its name a remnant of the glossy dream of urban renewal it once promised.

The city fathers seem in desperate search of quick economic fixes. Casinos now dot the city, a gleaming new baseball stadium opened last year next to a new opera house, and, in a place infamous for dirt-cheap real estate, $200,000 town homes are now sprouting on Woodward Avenue, one of Detroit's main drags. The new homes sit uneasily just blocks from row upon row of abandoned houses and garbage-strewn vacant lots.

I travel via taxi from my hotel to the conference. As soon as I get out of my cab, I am hit for money by a man named Reggie. I give him five dollars, not as an act of charity but as a spontaneous response to a perceived shakedown. The neighborhood made middle-class me uncomfortable.

At the meeting, I heard of a Jesus who might fit in very well in today's Detroit: the prophet of Luke 4:16-30, who came to preach good news to the poor and was run out of his hometown and almost killed for his efforts. The middle-class activists in attendance were told to be like Moses: people of modest means intent on liberating the oppressed who have nothing.

It was language anyone in church circles has heard for years. Yet, almost anywhere else in today's prosperous America, it would appear out of place. On the streets of Detroit, largely untouched by that wealth, it speaks to necessity. In other places, preachers can revert to various models of a therapeutic, cuddly Jesus obsessed with personal, rather than social, ills. Here that would sound ridiculous.

In Detroit, there is no pretending. The reality of the streets are too jarring to embrace any other Jesus than the one who is consumed with social salvation and finds trouble for his efforts. It remains a place where economic progress lags. But the theology you can find there may be as fine-tuned as anything coming out of its auto factories.

Peter Feuerherd is a frequent Commonweal contributor.