Atlanta, I have come to realize, is like America in all its complexity and contradiction. It is, as W.E.B. Du Bois said, south of the North but north of the South, challenging the assumptions and mores of each half of the nation. It’s a city that General Sherman had to burn to the ground so that Doctor King could rise from it a century later. A capital of slavery and a hub of black liberation. A city of rising prosperity and inequality, of suburban sprawl and status anxiety and immigrant influx and persistent poverty – and beneath it all, a web of faith communities and a corporate power structure that dominates civic life.