Not Set in Stone

In recalling the Newfoundland school debate during the late 20th century, this chapter considers the use of a direct democracy initiative that purportedly sought public input on a matter of communal religious rights. It raises the question as to whether a referendum is an appropriate tool to abandon minority rights which form part of a country's constitution. First, there is a brief discussion on the importance of free and democratic societies to foster civil society, including religious communities engaging in the public square. Second, the history of the Newfoundland education system will lay the foundation for a review of the perceived problems with churches running government-funded schools. Third, a short synopsis of the political machinations that led to two referendums and how the referendums were used as a legitimization tool by a government apparently unwilling to work out a viable solution that allowed some residual accommodation of the church schools. Finally, a reflection on what lessons may be learned from the Newfoundland experience.

The Orthodox Preference for Democracy: An American Response to “The Church in the Public Square” (Section II), in For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church

In For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church, there is a clear preference for the “democratic genius of the modern age.” This preference for democracy is due, in part, to the long experience of the Orthodox Church with other governmental forms, especially autocratic and authoritarian states.

A Trauma-Ridden Body Lifted High: Eschatological Imagination in a Public Square

Public demonstrations shed much meaning when the precarity of the human body’s standing in the public space is considered. This article seeks to decipher the complex messages such instances communicate through a case study of a one-person protest against a multinational conglomerate on a CCTV pole in Seoul. It describes how the body’s precarity generates transformative social imaginations through interdisciplinary analysis. Starting with a thick description of the protester’s and his community’s history, this article interprets the message conveyed in this particular public space through interdisciplinary analysis. The resulting interpretation allows the formation of an eschatological theological imagination which brews with the possibility to transform the public onlooker into participants in such imagination.

Gender and Public Space: Mapping Palimpsests of Art, Design, and Agency in Shahbag, Dhaka

Public space is an essential social infrastructure for the continuous negotiation of city life and democracy because it offers (ideally) an interactive platform for people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds and the forms of public life they cherish. This contribution inquires how public space’s design and materiality play a fundamental role in popular struggles for social justice. By focusing on the differentiated access of women to public space, the role of gender in its design, and appropriation through a feminist intersectionality lens, this article aims to understand better the complex interplay between urban space and its non‐human material agency vis‐à‐vis citizen mobilizations, movements, and socially engaged art interventions. Drawing from extensive participant observation and spatial analysis, the exemplary public space of Shahbag Chattwar (a public square/plaza) will shed light on the “gendered spatiality” of pivotal popular mobilizations and reclamations from the historical momentum of the 1952 language movement, over the 2013 contemporary Shahbag protests, and to the 2020 anti‐metro rail protests at the Dhaka University campus. Analyzing urban space as a “palimpsest,” this research reflects on both historic and ongoing scenarios of popular protests as they repeatedly occupy public space and leave spatial traces through spatial design and art. In sum, the article seeks to gain insight into public space as a principal site of contestation and negotiation of juxtaposed layers of gendered dynamics, civil rights, secularism, and fundamentalism.

Public Space as Infrastructure of Care

Our contribution puts forward an examination of public spaces as infrastructures of care. The eruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the “social distancing” measures imposed by several governments around the world, transformed the very use and conceptualization of urban public spaces. In Athens, Greece, public space, which had already been in different ways at the forefront of multifarious crises since 2010, reemerged, once again, as a critical site of sociopolitical antagonism. Public spaces, such as squares, became central places where people could come together to share knowledge and emotions, collectively alleviate anxieties, and thus (re)negotiate their positionality in the city. Such formations and enactments of social connection, affectivity, and antagonism, reflect the entanglement between everyday life and the political, and also draw attention to the association of public space with practices of care for collective well-being during precarious times. During the ever-increasing securitization and policing of urban spaces in Athens, in which everyday life has come to be ever more permeated by precarity and uncertainty, public spaces have been reenacted as safe and more inclusive environments where people can be and act together. Our contribution also employs a video to render more intelligible the affective interconnectedness of sounds, images, bodies, materialities, and practices in public space. By attending to the affective dynamics of a public square in central Athens, we examine the entanglements between the sociopolitical production of public space and forms of care during the COVID-19 pandemic.

New England Election Sermons: A Model for a Public Pulpit

This article surveys the now largely foreign practice of election sermons delivered in colonial New England. The ultimate aim of the study is to provide a way forward for contemporary pastors: first, to challenge the modern bifurcation of the religious and the so-called secular in the public square; second, to chart a middle course between the extremes of blind partisanship and anemic passivity in commenting on public concerns. The content of election sermons also challenges prevailing evangelical notions of good government by presenting a more integrated sociopolitical life, emphasizing older priorities of the common good, justice, and prudence. KEYWORDS: Puritanism, New England, election sermons, preaching, public theology, church Iand state, politics, common good

The Loud Unspoken Narratives from Confederate Monuments: How and Why We Should Quiet Them in the Public Square

Traditionally, historic preservation has aimed to protect “collective memory,”—references to a past accepted as commonly shared and collectively commemorated. Collective memory has been used to construct narratives that define communities and urge specific rules and values. In recent years, we have come to see that “collective memory” is indeed “curated memory,” and that memorializing it in public spaces, parks and squares has enabled the assertion of power by the curators over others and has often excluded those others from the stories of the nation. The thousands of statues and namings in honor of the leaders of the Confederacy make this point. If a city’s greatness is found in the quality of its public spaces, the stature and bearing of Confederate memorials there must cause us to rethink our preservation philosophies, as continuing to honor such repugnant figures denies the humanity and worth of those who are targets of the unspoken, hateful messages from these memorials, which undoubtedly inspires equally hateful acts. As we rethink the idea of “collective memory,” the real challenge will be enabling our institutions (legal, political and social), as well as individual designers and planners, to rewrite the narratives to reveal memories of a diverse people.