Public Spaces

One day I’ll write about my journey to a loving Black church in southern Middle Tennessee, but not today. My only preliminary today involves what a white man is doing in the pulpit of an otherwise Black church. When I started going to church here, I never dreamed of preaching or teaching. But you know how the Lord speaks? The Lord spoke to the pastor that I should preach. But I told her and the Lo...

Arabic is Nashville’s third most-spoken language, and around 80% of its speakers are Coptic Christians. Unlike members of almost every other U.S. Coptic community, most of Nashville’s Copts are working-class people. Yet most of these working-class Egyptian Christians are invisible to most other Nashville residents. This invisibility is disempowering and deliberate. Competing and flattening narrati...

The genuine article, and with the video. — Bryce Coptic Christians who have moved from their Egyptian homeland to the United States face an unusual quandary. Since 2015, they have become for many American politicians and churches stark evidence of worldwide Christian persecution . But the dominant culture—including some of these same politicians and churches—in practice often categorizes Copts as...

You live in a neighborhood that’s been overlooked and oppressed for years. Neighbors are turning against neighbors, refusing to lend money or otherwise help one another out. Your neighborhood is a joke to the larger community. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Come and see four inner-city neighborhoods in Birmingham, Alabama. Or hear them, rather, in this 18-minute podcast episode. Gerrel...

Wes Tank of Milwaukee and Dewey Tron of Arlington, Virginia have left traditional, corporate video directing behind in favor of showcasing their cities’ neighborhoods. As government funding for traditional public media and secondary media classes becomes uncertain, could such private media expertise at the local and micro-local levels create new means of audio and video expression in public spaces...

(18-min. podcast episode.) Several American cities have done rails to trails projects. In many ways, Milwaukee’s Beerline Trail is like most of the projects. Train service through Milwaukee’s Northeast industrial corridor left, so Milwaukee has turned its tracks into an attractive trail for walking and biking, and the residents and city are still working on it. Get full access to Political Devotio...

The Columbia Pike Documentary Project invites us to encounter one of the most diverse communities in the world. With people speaking over a hundred languages living together with little in the way of ethnic enclaves, Columbia Pike in Arlington offers what may be a unique experience in diversity. In this 18-minute podcast episode, I interview project team members Sushmita Mazumdar , Dewey Tron , an...

20-minute podcast episode. Our neighborhoods are most often like America’s Third Coast, a flyover region on our way to home or work. What would it take for our neighborhoods — urban, suburban, rural, small-town — to become as vital to us as our home or work? Sara Daleiden works on the Third Coast, literally and metaphorically. She facilitates Milwaukee neighborhoods that wish to transform their pu...

11-minute podcast episode. What could liturgy and mutual aid have in common? Both are actions that, when done creatively, give all parties the freedom to respond in life-giving ways and to discover themselves in community. This the second of two podcast episodes about a small Arlington church that sold its building and land at a discount to make way for Gilliam Place , a six-story affordable-housi...

26-minute podcast episode. Most Arlington teachers can’t afford to live in Arlington. While Victoria and I were teaching there, we met teachers and other school staff members who were fortunate to find affordable housing at Gilliam Place , a relatively new, six-story apartment building at the corner of Columbia Pike and South Lincoln Street. The idea for Gilliam Place came at a retreat in 2009, wh...

Last year, two of my classes remixed prominent public messages in Arlington to critique them. Their model was Zaq Landsberg ’s sculpture Reclining Liberty , a remix of the Statue of Liberty that has found her new site-specific home among Arlington’s permanent monuments celebrating freedom and public life. News shows in D.C. and New York City discussed why her pose resembles the reclining Buddha an...

20-minute episode. In 2007, three recent college grads had no intention of starting Casa Chirilagua . But it happened. Casa now serves more than 100 families with after-school programs, mentorships, adult classes, and leadership development in Arlandria, a largely Latino community just south of Arlington that the first Salvadorian immigrants nicknamed Chirilagua. The three grads moved into one of...

Two days ago, Victoria and I visited the pro-Palestinian encampment at George Washington University. Because the District of Columbia isn’t willing at this point to take down the encampment, it’s one of the few encampments in the country arising out of the war protests that amount to an extended laboratory of students’ public life together. We didn’t come to discuss the war in Gaza. Instead, we wa...

Meet Adam Henry, who creates both art and public spaces. The combination led to Adam’s appointment in January as Amazon HQ2’s first artist in residence . On our podcast, Adam shares his approaches—his literal approaches—to strangers at coffee shops, restaurants, and subways. He sketches them and then introduces himself to his subjects. He gives them the art and, quite often, hears back from them a...

In this more personal podcast episode, I speak with three envoys from our public God: * Bethany and I ride the bus and discuss interior design , urban planning , and her installation art . * A local paper objects to free bus service, despite its cost effectiveness, because some citizens might make buses their homes . * My neighbor admits to, on rare occasions, riding buses to keep warm . She teach...

Bryce and Victoria move from the suburbs to the city. Bryce sells his car and tries out the bus service by heading to StudioPAUSE. There he meets Sushmita Mazumdar, an artist and a poet, whose stories and curated objects hold a mirror up to support and celebrate Columbia Pike’s multiethnic community. Format: narrative with clips from interviews of Sushmita as well as of Lloyd Wolf, Director of the...