Live Online: FBCL Reads Online Book Club

Welcome to FBCL’s online book club! We invite anyone 18 and up who enjoy the comfort of virtual meetings, to join us online every fourth Wednesday at 10:00am on Webex.  We will be discussing Prophetic City: Houston on the Cusp of a Changing America by Dr. Stephen Klineberg. 

Sociologist Stephen Klineberg presents “a trailblazing study” (Kirkus Reviews) that shows how the city of Houston has emerged as a microcosm for America’s future—based on a meticulously researched, thirty-eight-year study of its changing economic, demographic, and cultural landscapes.

Houston, Texas, long thought of as a traditionally blue-collar black/white Southern city, has transformed into one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse metro areas in the nation, surpassing even New York by some measures.

With a diversifying economy and large numbers of both highly skilled technical jobs in engineering and medicine and low-skilled minimum-wage jobs in construction, restaurant work, and personal services, Houston has become a magnet for the new divergent streams of immigration that are transforming America in the 21st century. And thanks to an annual systematic survey conducted over the past thirty-eight years, the ongoing changes in attitudes, beliefs, and life experiences have been measured and studied, creating a compelling data-driven map of the challenges and opportunities that are facing Houston and the rest of the country.

In Prophetic City, we’ll meet some of the new Americans, including a family who moved to Houston from Mexico in the early 1980s and is still trying to find work that pays more than poverty wages. There’s a young man born to highly educated Indian parents in an affluent Houston suburb who grows up to become a doctor in the world’s largest medical complex, as well as a white man who struggles with being prematurely pushed out of the workforce when his company downsizes.

Registration required.