Marking the Place of Sin and Grace: The Meaning of Our City Monuments

Communities tell their stories through public landmarks. What does your city’s landmarks say about you?

This Is Our City March 27, 2012

Every city is home to monuments: physical markers that tell a story about the place and the people who live there. Whether a granite statue or a famed intersection, our city’s monuments reveal where its citizens have been and where they are headed.

Richmond, Virginia, features an entire boulevard dedicated to telling the city’s rich history through monuments. Monument Avenue is a beautiful, stately street where Civil War greats are commemorated in stone. But other Richmond monuments—such as the Manchester Slave Dock on the James River—unveil a different chapter of the city’s story.

In this documentary film, we explore the role monuments play in our communities—and how Christians can become “living monuments” of healing and transformation in their own neighborhoods.

And we’d love to learn about the monuments in your city. To this end, we invite you to create a short video about a symbolic place in your community. Show us the monument: What does it say about your city? And how does it invite your city’s Christians to labor on behalf of the common good? We’ll feature the best videos on our website in the coming weeks.

To send us the video, upload it to Vimeo or YouTube, and email us at connect@thisisourcity.org.

We look forward to hearing from you!

—the This Is Our City team

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