This invisibility is disempowering and deliberate. Competing and flattening narratives from liberals and conservatives and even many U.S. Coptic Orthodox clergy members tend to discourage Nashville’s working-class Copts from organizing and from participating in mutual aid.

Above: Lydia Yousief (left) and Keria Nashed

Enter Elmahaba Center, an independent Coptic community organization founded in 2019 by Lydia Yousief. It serves all of Nashville’s Arabic-speaking immigrants, refugees, and their children—and anyone else in town who asks for help. Elmahaba offers mutual aid, tutoring, college prep classes, art classes, civic engagement, case management, livestream informational sessions for new immigrants, Arabic and English classes, and an oral history project. Elmahaba Center also creates and sponsors art and cultural events around Nashville. (Because they’re Middle Tennessee’s only Arabic community organization, the’ll create and sponsor other programs as needs arise.)

Elmahaba Center is unique because of its focus on an unserved community—the Arabic-speaking working class. Learn how Elmahaba Center navigates deficient and sometimes false narratives to support Coptic and Muslim working-class solidarity, often against the wishes of the workers’ religious clerics. Learn how Elmahaba’s leadership does so by living out a vibrant Coptic Orthodox faith.

Above: the Elmahaba Center van, chock full of diapers.

You’ll hear from Lydia, from two volunteers (well, three, counting me), and from Anthropology Professor Candace Lukasik, who has written about Elmahaba’s work in her recent book Martyrs and Migrants. You’ll hear parishoners singing in a Nashville Coptic Orthodox Church and volunteers talking about their work as they hand out diapers to Nashville’s young Arabic-speaking families.

My thanks to Keria Nashed and Lydia for meeting with me and to Lydia for being my guide to the liturgy during my visit to Nashville’s St. George Coptic Orthodox Church.

Above: part of the narthex entryway of St. George Coptic Orthodox Church.

Above: doors from the narthex to the nave in St. George Coptic Orthodox Church.

How do Coptic migrants navigate between these narratives of exemplary martyrs and undesirable migrants? I interview anthropologist Candace Lukasik, who writes about these issues in her new book published by NYU Press, Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire.

Above: View from a monastery in Upper Egypt, fall 2009. Photo by Candace Lukasik. Used by permission.

I met Dr. Lukasik last fall at the Political Theology Network’s biannual conference in Nashville. She co-facilitated our section “Up/Rootedness” about place and migration, themes dear to my heart. After choosing the section, I found that I had migrated to a land of anthropologists, and I got a three-day practicum there on ways that anthropology can inform political theology (and vice versa).

At first, our section seemed a bit like an Indiana Jones convention, full of professors who early in their respective movies seemed to trade in their tweed jackets and classrooms for fedoras and foreign fieldwork. Presenters discussed their extensive and often dangerous work in places such as Kashmir, the Columbian Amazon, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Egypt.

I discuss some of that anthropological adventure notion with Dr. Lukasik, who has a different perspective. For her, anthropology is both an intellectual and a spiritual practice, and it backgrounds any distance and difference between her work at the university and in the field. While reading her book and interviewing her, I found that anthropology also has led her to remarkable friendships, a subtler and more gracious view of the world, and a conversion to the Coptic Orthodox faith.

The video interview is lavishly punctuated with several of Dr. Lukasik’s striking photos from her fieldwork (see Photos & timestamps below).

I hope the interview inspires your own desire to cross borders and to learn from and support those you find on the other side.

Topics & timestamps

00:30 — Setting the scene of Martyrs and Migrants: the Copts as a Christian minority in Egypt and as an Egyptian minority in the United States; the Copts in the U.S. being understood as persecuted Christians and Middle-Eastern Other

01:35 — Lukasik’s book summary: What has migration to the West done for and to the Copts? What light does the Copts’ struggle shed on geopolitical issues? What issues about the practice of Christianity today do the Copts’ experiences raise?

04:30 — What drew Lukasik to her work with the Copts in Egypt and in the U.S.? Her background, her trip as a teen for an Arabic language program and her discovery of Coptic Christianity and its “in-between-ness” within Christianity.

06:30 — Her trips to Egypt and slow discovery of migration’s effects on the Coptic tradition

07:10 — Her growing relations with Coptic friends and families; her description of her fieldwork, particularly during the violence of 2017

09:00 — The effect of the martyrdom of the twenty Egyptian Christians and one Ghanaian in Libya in 2015 and subsequent violence in Egypt had on her ongoing work

12:00 — The effect of images of this violence on the Coptic diaspora and on transnational relations among Copts

13:10 — How fieldwork affects her teaching; how she presents anthropology to perspective students; how she has come to understand the interplay of classroom and fieldwork (versus Bryce’s “Indiana Jones” theory of the professor with the adventurous side students hear about but don’t experience); anthropology as attending to the messiness of the world

19:10 — The blend of her spiritual and intellectual journey involving her classroom, her research, and her fieldwork, including her conversion to Coptic Orthodoxy

20:45 — How the situations of Coptic Christians and Palestinian Christians compare with respect to the powerful Christian persecution narrative and the applicability of Lukasik’s concept of an “economy of blood.” The nature of narratives that make a people visible to empire.

24:50 — The “economy” of the “economy of blood” and the “blood” of the “economy of blood”; the “economy of blood” through theological and political lenses

29:20 — How asylum law as practiced with Coptic petitioners often differs from other, less legible Middle Eastern Christian petitioners because of the economy of blood

32:00 — The tension between the Christian persecution narrative and the need for specific harm in Coptic asylum application hearings to create legibility before the law

35:12 — Copts work in law enforcement often to create visibility within the police forces for Copts in the community and to help the forces differentiate between Copts and Egyptian Muslims. Copts work in law enforcement often in an attempt to keep Copts from being seen as the Other.

39:10 — Copts in law enforcement are somewhat like Irish emigres working for law enforcement to become legible as part of their new American community. A group’s distinction from Dangerous Others is part of becoming American.

40:42 — How the Coptic Orthodox Church serves as the governments’ point of contact with its Coptic population in both Egypt and in places like Nashville, Tennessee. The causes and downsides of such relationships: the church wants to play to the role that the broader geography expects of it, but that role is challenged by the needs and perspectives of poor and working-class Copts.

44:12 — The innovative work of Lydia Yousief and the Elmahaba Center in Nashville in community organizing and community support, work that makes up for the inattention to new Coptic migrants by the Coptic Church in Nashville

46:12 — The first Coptic migrants came to Nashville to build the next phase of Opryland

46:52 — How Tyson Foods covered up the exposure of Coptic workers to COVID; how the church discouraged the Tyson workers from unionizing and from forming coalitions with other migrant workers

47:22 — Elmahaba Center interrupts the neoliberal emphasis on who are—and who are not—members of the Body of Christ by emphasizing community needs and the need for different perspectives that a community carries

Photos & timestamps

00:31 — Cover of Martyrs and Migrants

05:44 — Candace Lukasik in 2009, visiting around 40 monasteries over four days with a Coptic Orthodox youth group in Cairo

09:36 — Coptic martyr blood behind glass at the Coptic Cathedral in Cairo

16:34 — An image on martyrdom in a Coptic church that Dr. Lukasik used in her class the day before the video. The image is from the bombing near Saint Mark’s Orthodox Coptic Cathedral in Cairo in December 2016.

17:56 — An image on martyrdom in a Coptic church that Dr. Lukasik used in her class the day before the video. The image is from a commemoration room at the Cathedral for the 21 martyrs of Libya.

19:31 — Bahjūra from a rooftop

26:43 — Image from a church in Upper Egypt. It might be seen as a metaphor for thinking about the economy as part of inclusion in the Body and reflection of the outside

27:44 — U.S. and Egyptian flags in a Staten Island home

29:07 — A Coptic Church in Jersey City

30:37 — One of the computers Copts use in Upper Egypt to enter in Green Card Lottery information

31:06 — A white board where Coptic migrants take their photos to apply to the Green Card Lottery in Upper Egypt

37:28 — “Honeywell Security / Proud to be a Coptic American”: issues of security and inclusion

43:47 — An image of St. Mina in a Nashville gas station where Copts work

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Come and see four inner-city neighborhoods in Birmingham, Alabama. Or hear them, rather, in this 18-minute podcast episode.

Gerrel Jones has discovered Jesus as an effective community organizer, and his Renew Birmingham and its extraordinary team of staff members and volunteers are putting Jesus’s community-building principles to work in the four poorest neighborhoods in Birmingham. Renew’s story, its approach and its outcomes will challenge you to help communities in new ways—and perhaps to understand Jesus and his mission in new ways, too.

Above: Gerrel Jones, Renew Birmingham Founder and Executive Director

Resources:

Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America by Nathan McCall

Gerrel’s plug for Makes Me Wanna Holler:

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Gerrel’s plug for Man’s Search for Meaning:

Jesus and the Politics of Roman Palestine by Richard A. Horsley

Jesus and the Politics provides an excellent theological and historical framework for understanding Jesus’s work as a community organizer.

From the publisher: “Learning from anthropological studies of the more subtle forms of peasant politics, Horsley discerns from these sources how Jesus, as a Moses- and Elijah-like prophet, generated a movement of renewal in Israel that was focused on village communities.”

Renew Birmingham’s website

Gerrel Jones’s talk before a group of Birmingham church leaders on what church should look like

Connective Tissue’s great interview of Gerrel Jones

Above: Jason Williams, Renew Birmingham Youth Program Director

Music: “Wild Wild Wet” by Pecan Pie. Used by permission.

Citations to quotes:

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Second edition (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 318.

Richard A. Horsley, You Shall Not Bow down and Serve Them: The Political Economic Projects of Jesus and Paul (Cascade Books, 2021), 71.

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When I checked in last month at the political theology conference, my worst fears were immediately realized. I wasn’t registered. The registrar apologized and searched, but my badge was nowhere. Then I happened on it: I had forgotten that I had registered as Bryce Tolpen, my pen name.

We laughed: I didn’t know who I was. And I had no business being there. I have no degrees in theology or political science. As it turned out—lovely people—it was all the same to them.

We citizens are generalists in a world of specialists. To rediscover democracy, we must lean into our imposter syndrome.

The second: intentional walk

No subtitle has earned an author more notoriety than Hannah Arendt’s A Report on the Banality of Evil. The criticism seems unfair. Arendt makes the same point about the Holocaust a dozen years earlier in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and nobody cares. My theory is we don’t read theory. But when she applies her theory to a specific mass murderer, and implicates not a monster but mass man, we pounce.

Here, in a nutshell from that earlier book, appears the incipient Eichmann in Jerusalem:

The philistine is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomized individual who is produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass man whom Himmler organized for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than of the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything—belief, honor, dignity—on the slightest provocation.1

Himmler, in sum, recruited not criminals but the bourgeois, knowing they’d do anything for security. That security, Arendt says, involves not just financial stability but the routine of work:

For the ruthless machines of domination and extermination, the masses of co-ordinated philistines provided much better material and were capable of even greater crimes than so-called professional criminals, provided only that these crimes were well organized and assumed the appearance of routine jobs.2

Our work life trains us not to love the world.

At my recent high-school reunion, an old friend described his adjustment to retirement. It took him only a year, he said, to acclimate himself to irrelevance.

Me, too. But I’ve had the benefit of going through something like retirement once before. Half a lifetime ago, I quit my law career and almost lost my mind. Who was I when I wasn’t drafting pleadings and negotiating claims weekdays from 9 to 5? In Arendt’s terms, I was a bourgeois who by becoming a minister had also become a philistine, “the bourgeois isolated from his own class.”

So I got therapy for three years. During my first few sessions, though, I knew I could avoid working through all that darkness if I chose to get my relevance back. Would I have participated in genocide to get it? God, I hope not. But I might have come out of retirement just to prosecute my shadow self.

The third: sign stealing

Just as the nouveau Texan is all hat and no cattle, so also the nouveau patriot is all flag and no republic. But it was “to the republic, for which it stands” for which I stood each school-day morning, a form of government that pledges, first and foremost, to protect the res publica, the public “thing.” What’s a signifier without its object? And what becomes of us as representamen? “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip?”3

The fourth: pine tar

In Arlington, Virginia, stickers and stones may yet break the bones of oppression.

Stumbling stones are being installed in sidewalks to mark where African Americans spent their lives enslaved in what’s now a Washington, D.C. suburb. And stumbling stickers are being stuck to sidewalks to mark where neighbors have recently been disappeared by ICE agents.

There’s something urgent about stickers, especially compared to stones. The comparison brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s distinction between brochures and books at the outset of his collection of feuilleton known as One-Way Street:

Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book—in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment.4

Stumbling stickers and the brief liturgy that accompanies their placement are the minutemen of Arlington’s exacting moment.

The fifth: mound visit

The Quaker equivalent to the Lord’s supper is a business meeting.5

Both the Lord’s supper and a business meeting, of course, can be done perfunctorily. People may watch the clock. But both can be enriched by a sense of Presence. And both, when done with the right heart, can lead to inner transformation.6

For inner transformation to occur in a business meeting, according to a 1993 Quaker pamphlet, Friends shouldn’t try to reach consensus. Instead, they should wait for a sense of the meeting.

Three practices enhance Quaker business meetings and invite the collective inward Presence to lead the group to a sense of the meeting. The first is release, the patient, nonjudgmental listening to others’ pent-up emotions. The second is long focus. “. . . Ideas in competition shorten focal length,” says Barry Morely, the pamphlet’s author. Instead of contention and compromise, Friends “stand on an inward high place and look beyond the ideas being discussed.”7

The third enhancing practice is transition to Light. “. . . long focus brings us to the Source of resolution and clarity. It is in this Light that God’s voice is heard.”8

Of course, all of this can make for a long business meeting. When I first read this pamphlet, I was also reading Francesca Polletta’s book Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements. She describes how the American pacifists active before World War II put in the time to work things out among themselves. The pacifists used the Quaker sense of the meeting to resolve “tensions between the absolutism of personal conscience and the demands of concerted group action.”9

Perhaps public freedom—and personal transformation, too—really is an endless meeting.

The sixth: warning track

Behold, those who insist on literal readings live in king’s houses. If you enter, watch your step. Nathan had to speak in a parable to King David. David himself had to speak as a madman before Achish, the king of Gath. Hamlet does the same before his uncle, the King of Denmark. It’s a rare king who doesn’t demand, as Prince Hal does of Falstaff, to “come, roundly, roundly.”

The entire New Testament circulated just outside of the Caesars’ grasp. To hear its range, we must leave our fine homes and go out into the wilderness to see.10

The seventh: double clutch

A recent college grad and I had coffee last month, and they used a big word. I wish I had interrupted them and asked them to tell me its meaning, but of course I was too proud. If I had done so, I would’ve always recalled the word as pleasantly as I blush.

The eighth: fan interference

This hour’s story is the story of the widow interrupting the story of Gehazi about the same widow to demand her house and land.

The king was questioning Gehazi, the servant of the man of God, about all the great things Elisha had done; and, as he was describing to the king how he had brought the dead to life, the selfsame woman began her appeal to the king for her house and land. “My lord king,” said Gehazi, “this is the woman, and this is her son whom Elisha restored to life.”11

It’s the story of another king, King Ahasuerus of Persia, who couldn’t sleep, so he had his servants read to him from the chronicles. He learned from the chronicles that Mordecai had saved his life. As they read to the king, Mordecai was outside the king’s gate in sackcloth and ashes, mourning the king’s edict to kill the Jews, and Haman was walking in to ask the king to kill Mordecai first.12

The past now is more than prologue; it’s present. This hour is the hour when the men of Nineveh and the queen of the south will rise up,13 when many of the bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep will rise and enter our cities to be seen by many.14 No story is safe.

We are those “upon whom the ends of the ages have come,”15 and we just want a little distraction, a little peace. But what gives us peace demands justice.

The ninth: pitch framing

One model for a diverse, republican polity is what historian Richard White calls the Middle Ground, the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Great Lakes region over which neither the Algonquians nor the French who lived there could impose their will.

Each side operated there consistently with its own worldview, but each side had to speak to the other in terms of the other’s worldview. In these interactions, any congruences were precious.16

One important congruence was the concept of a father. In their relationship with each other, the French wanted to be the fathers, and the Algonquians wanted to be the children. This isn’t surprising, given the two sides’ different conceptions of fathers:

The French were quite at home with such patriarchal formulations and attached quite specific meanings to them. For them all authority was patriarchal, from God the Father, to the king (the father of his people), to the father in his home. Fathers commanded; sons obeyed. The Ottawas understood the relationship somewhat differently. A father was kind, generous, and protecting. A child owed a father respect, but a father could not compel obedience.17

When the relationship between the Algonquians and the French would fray, it was usually because either the Algonquians had been “disobedient” or the French had been ungenerous or unsparing. Each side would remonstrate with the other by trying to make the other’s concept of a father more like its own.

I wonder if something like this divergence in the concept of a father explains some of the New Testament’s divergent uses of the word “father.” Paul, for instance, laments the surplus number of tutors in the Corinthian congregations, pointing out that he is something more important—their father.18 Jesus, however, tells his disciples not to call anyone “father”:

“Do not call any man on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor must you be called ‘teacher’; you have one Teacher, the Messiah.”19

Paul seems to refer to something like the Algonquian sense of a father, while Jesus seems to warn against something like the French sense of a father.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus refers to his Father in heaven at almost every turn. It isn’t until after Jesus’ resurrection, though, that he pointedly includes his disciples as children of God in the same sense:

“But go to my brothers, and tell them that I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”20

Jesus’ resurrection makes him a big brother; when he rises from the dead, he becomes “the firstborn among many brothers and sisters.”21 These verses seem to lay the foundation for Jesus’ assemblies made up of people from many nations, assemblies characterized by equality and love.

What’s the greater of the two models for a diverse, republican polity found in the Middle Ground? The cultural norms developed by gradual mutual understanding among disparate peoples or the Algonquians’ political freedom and lack of subordination associated with their concept of a father? Maybe, from a republican standpoint, between these two models some congruency exists.

Thanks for reading (or listening)! Feel free to comment below on any or all of the nine innings that make up this bullpen post. — Bryce

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

We kids would pluck their crispy, brown skins from our Tidewater pines’ trunks, and we’d slyly stick the skins on one another’s shirts and sweaters. Exoskeletons, though, even bug-eyed ones, usually were no scarier than the replica human skeletons that hung later in our biology classrooms and haunted houses. And when I’d change careers, my father would never lose his equanimity; he’d quietly support me.

I practiced law right out of school for sixteen years. My father practiced law right out of school, too, but he stuck with it, and he ended up on the circuit court, our state’s court of jury trials. When he reached the mandatory retirement age of 70, his fellow judges threw him a celebration dressed up as a judicial hearing.

A jury of Pop’s peers—robed judges—filled the box’s fourteen chairs. Lawyers and family occupied the benches beyond the rail. Sitting there, I thought of the Episcopal Church that my parents attended—the robed clergy and choir, the communion rail, and the well-dressed laity, with our family always seated on the Epistle side, in a second-row pew. Pop learned to lie down in the green pastures of his era’s great institutions—marriage (64 years!), the church, the courtroom.

Above: Pop at court, nearing his “retirement”

Granddaddy, though, lived in times more like our own, an era less friendly to institutions. During the Great Depression, he made a living closing banks. He and my grandmother divorced while Pop was in law school. Granddaddy had started right where I ended, teaching high-school English. My grandmother, one of his students, was quite taken with him, and she quit college after one year to marry him.

The officiant, Judge Bowman, roasted Pop from the bench. He described Pop’s way of orienting each criminal defendant to his courtroom. Pop would introduce the defendant to the Commonwealth’s attorney, the bailiff, the clerk, the court reporter, and even the courtroom’s previous judges, dead and depicted in the portraits hanging from the courtroom’s walls. For Pop, due process was grounded in hospitality and respect.

When Judge Bowman was done, Pop spoke. He started by introducing the assembled to each judge hanging from the walls. At first I wondered: hadn’t he heard Judge Bowman? Was he being ironic? Yes and yes, but he was mostly being Pop: fastidious, gracious and procedural. Everyone got the same treatment.

At 70, Pop still had plenty in the tank, so the ceremony didn’t really mark his retirement. He was only leaving his hometown courtroom, which at his age he had to surrender. He began substituting for judges all over the state three to five days a week until his hearing began to fail him at age 89. At his retirement ceremony, we heard highlights and whimsy from a career that wasn’t half done.

Growing up, my siblings and I used to beg Pop to show some of the family movies. We’d watch Granddaddy on vacation at around 60 years old, floating endlessly on his back in the Atlantic Ocean. He was probably asleep. How did he do it? My father rarely talked about his upbringing or his father. But his choices not to stop the camera at the beach, not to edit the film at home (he owned a splicer), and not to privilege other reels on movie nights suggested to me that he felt some mix of admiration, horror, and ultimately acceptance regarding his father’s orientation to life.

I kind of floated through my teen years and college. I read ravenously and loved writing about what I read. (My recent post “Father Abraham’s Lit Crit” felt like glory days, a return to the critical essays I wrote almost weekly in school.) But exams, and even many classes outside the humanities, were often nuisances, and while I couldn’t avoid the former, I often skipped the latter.

I’m not exactly sure how I presented in those days to my father, but I have some idea from what felt then like his constant refrain: “You gotta get organized, boy.” My brother and I were given to understand that “boy” was how Pop’s uncles invariably addressed him, but the older I got, the more I took Pop’s injunctions personally, as if disorganization were something I couldn’t do much about. Pop wasn’t a teacher, but he expected those around him to develop the skills and character that made certain virtues, like organization, evident and habitual. Honestly, I didn’t get organized until I had to—that is, until I practiced law.

I was more like Mom. She’d sometimes look out a window and say to no one in particular, “I was born in the wrong age.” She was a history major, and her reveries would involve the English aristocracy before the rise of the gentry class. I was an English major, born in the wrong book. I admired Laurence Sterne’s slow, easily distracted Tristram Shandy, whose disorganized autobiography, written around the time and place of my mother’s reveries, didn’t get around to chronicling his own birth until volume three.

Tristram also lacked self-confidence. Thematically, his lack stemmed from his failure to meet the expectations of an ordered—but absurd, thankfully; the book is trenchant comedy—outside world. Like Tristram, I maintained a faith in a kind of impenetrable membrane between my word-fortified interior life and whatever it took to function adequately beyond it.

Saint Paul, whom I read as heroically externalizing a similar struggle, helped to draw me as a teen to the Charismatic movement. I left our family’s Episcopal church and, along with attending almost nightly Bible studies during summers, memorized a few chapters of Paul’s letters. When Paul told the Athenians that in Jesus “we live, and move, and have our being,”1 it felt to me like the assertion of an involved interior life against a recalcitrant exterior world. Paul, I came to think, was committed to breaking his membrane, to living out his ideas in public, and he often got stoned and beaten for it.

I wasn’t so bold, so I beat myself up instead. My first hint of this practice came during my first year after law school, which I spent clerking for a federal judge with whom my father had fixed me up. When the time came for my review, the judge wrote some nice things. In the space reserved for negative remarks, the judge wrote only, “Lacks self-confidence.” I finally had a label, and I resonated with it.

But earlier, one summer home from law school, I tried externalizing my inner Paul. I finally responded to one of Pop’s “organized” reminders. “I am organized, Pop, just on a higher level.”

Pop said nothing. But I wonder now if I had made him think again about his father, tanning the front of his hairy exoskeleton in the ocean.

Maybe Granddaddy had reached some higher level. He had his fiction published in the William and Mary Quarterly. Pop loved to tell the story of an English professor who, over his long career, improbably had taught both Granddaddy and Pop. One day the professor told Pop, with (as far as I could tell) unwarranted candor, “You’re not half the student your father was.”

I became a lawyer, though, because I had some of my father’s qualities. Pop, my two siblings, and I—all lawyers—all loved argument and reason, and my siblings and I learned from Pop to admire a kind of reason grounded in character and precedent. At the dinner table during our childhood, most of Pop’s stories amounted to either encomia or cautionary tales involving friends, relatives, or other lawyers. As we ate, the three of us imbibed something like what Montesquieu called “the spirit of laws.”

Of course, I had come to no “higher level,” and at age 25, as Pop and I sat in my apartment a few city blocks from the situs of my clerkship, I admitted to a lot of arrogance and told him that I loved him. After that day, I still preferred talking about abstractions and he about people. But our conversation became gradually easier.

Towards the end of my law career, I got a call one night from Pop. I wasn’t home, so he left a message. I was at the office preparing for what turned out to be my longest trial. I represented the plaintiff in a car accident case. My client had sustained only soft-tissue damage, but due to its extent and to a peculiarity in our state’s tort law, this case’s potential upside was greater than that of even the wrongful death case with which I was to later close out my legal career.

Though Pop wasn’t given to discussing abstractions, he loved bon mots—his or others’—for their wit and felicity. If just the right words failed him, however, he never compensated with loquacity. He simply got blunt.

The message on the answering machine was short. Pop concluded with, “You’re a damn good lawyer, Bryce. Give ‘em hell.”

When I heard the message later that night, I felt the wind shift. The next morning, I seemed to enter the courtroom with sails aloft and alow. We eventually won what then was the largest soft-tissue jury award in state history.

I’ve often reflected on the Patriarchs’ notion of blessing. Was Isaac, in giving Jacob the older son’s blessing, really as blind—or, more to the point, as gullible—as Genesis suggests? By the time Isaac was old, I think he knew that Jacob, described in the narrative as one who lived quietly, “dwelling in tents,”2 and not at all like his father, would find his own way.

Pop left that blessing on my answering machine over a quarter century ago. I since became an assistant pastor before following Granddaddy into the classroom. In all three professions and especially in my spare time, I’ve largely dwelt in my words—often in my journals, in the margins of books, and now also in this Substack.

A couple of years ago, my college roommates, now scattered from Maine to Texas, had our first reunion. One of them told the rest of us and our spouses about his outstanding memory of me: “All hell would be breaking loose in the house, but Bryce would be slouched in a chair, reading a book as if his life depended on it.” I had forgotten that.

I loved lawyering, pastoring, and teaching. But in a sense, my professions were background noise to my reading and writing. They were passing buildings and trees along the tracks my words and I traveled together. Retirement last year means I can travel this way more. But sometimes, after the sun sets and the trains’ windows begin reflecting my interiors, I’ve seen my self-doubts there, sharp as ever, stowaways from my previous professions.

Deflating memories return. One involves one of my own English professors, whom I approached for an explanation for the “D” he had given me on a paper.

“Because I was feeling generous,” he responded sharply. “Who taught you how to write?”

A few years back, at age 94, Pop died. He wasn’t around when I retired last year and finally gave myself up to research and writing.

We all grieve differently. Outwardly and initially, my grief work involved repeating, to my family but also to anyone who would listen, my father’s spoonerisms and his many twists and turns of phrase or of pronunciation (“Not a chonce” when the answer was no; “Leave us went” as our signal to go). These odd verbal bits served in his domestic life for the bon mots he reserved for more public occasions. Channeling his stock phrases still helps to bring him near as I process his passing.

So does talking to him. A deacon at his church—a dear family friend—suggested that I talk to him whenever I want to share an occurrence or a memory with him. This practice has helped to open another world to me. As my sister observed apropos of her own experience in grieving the loss of our parents, the membrane between the realms of the living and the dead is thinner than we may think.

Sometimes my parents seem to speak to me, too, usually through a memory or through some unusually forceful association. Or sometimes it happens when I read certain authors. Pop often seems present to me in the essays of James Baldwin and Ann E. Berthoff, both of whom were born the same year as Pop. Neither writer shared Pop’s—or my own—privilege in this white-male-dominated society. But all three of them loved justice and loved America enough to seek, in the Bible’s sense (and to borrow from the title to Baldwin’s mid-career novel), another country.

This past March, Pop also showed up in a poem. Poet Luisa A. Igloria’s “The Language of the Law,” one of her daily poems published on Via Negativa, speaks my truth about Pop and about his and my relationship with such specificity and force that I contacted Luisa and received her kind permission to republish it here. It reads like prose, like testimony:

Parents sometimes say things like I hope
you follow in my footsteps. Or at least,
my parents did. In my case, the hope was
law school, because my father was a lawyer
most of his life; then in the last twelve
or fifteen, a judge in the local circuit
court. I was in high school when he started,
and had learned to type. He was, however,
no good at it; but didn't think he should
ask any of the law clerks or secretaries
to type up his statements of decision. And so
at the end of the day on Fridays, he'd lug home
one of the office machines, a heavy Remington
Standard with a gunmetal frame and green keys,
and ask for my help. I loved the language of
the law— formal, latinate, nuanced— though I
didn't always understand everything such words
could mean: prima facie, incumbent; appellate,
plea, substantial evidence. We sat at the table
after dinner, my fingers ready to go while he
chewed on the end of a pencil as he reviewed
scribbles on a legal pad. Interviewers often
ask me how it happened that my daughters
became writers too; and how or if I'd pushed
them (that always gives me pause). How much
of our propensities— that bright quickening
to language, those qualities of dark brooding—
are passed down somehow in the blood? How much
is nurtured, willed, imposed; and how much accident,
a hand held out as if to say stop, that's not
what I intended? And it's true, we look to language
to help us regulate, to keep monarchs from corrupting
their powers, to give expression to both the seething
and the profound intimacies in our days. Not yet
a perfect arbitration by any means, but I think
there was a time when we said things like justice
and rights and recourse to the law for remedy or
relief, and it felt like we knew what these meant.

Tears, of course, the first few times I read this poem—the hot tears of deep connection.

More importantly than its uncanny encapsulation of the relationship between Pop and me, Luisa’s poem seems, from my point of view, to put the current administration’s attack on due process in the context of her father’s—as well as my father’s—character, values, and public labor.

But it wasn’t until that evening, while I was in the kitchen sautéing vegetables, that Pop reached through Luisa’s poem and spoke to me more directly. Some of the poem’s lines returned, and through them came my father’s heart. What he said startled me, the way unsurprising words can surprise us in a dream:

“You’re a damn good writer, Bryce. Give ‘em hell.”

More tears. Triumphant grief and realization.

Unlike his father, Pop wasn’t given to poetry. He liked to quote only one couplet as far as I recall. You’ll recognize it: “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” I think Pop liked Eliot’s terse and implied critique of the women’s pretense. Eliot was of Granddaddy’s generation, too, and I wonder if Prufrock reminded Pop of him.

My own oft-quoted line from the same poem—again, no surprise—is “Do I dare to eat a peach?”

Okay, Pop, I will.

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Above: Pop and I long ago. The short footnotes below refer to full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

Above: Still from Reimagine Milwaukee Day | Imagine MKE, video by Wes Tank.

Our first video episode includes a ten-minute introduction highlighting Wes’s and Dewey’s community video work. The episode moves into an hour-long conversation among Wes, Dewey, and Bryce about their media work, their communities’ needs, and the trends in media production that affect communities at the neighborhood level. The conversation is also sprinkled with relevant portions of more media from these local talents, Dewey and Wes.

Wes owns Tank Think, a media production company that supports Milwaukee’s arts, literacy, government, health, and social justice. He also co-owns with Sara Daleiden the Washington Park Media Center, which trains neighborhood media people through an audio-visual club and mentoring. Catch Wes’s Vimeo channel for his professional videos and his YouTube channel for his more insane videos, including his viral videos setting Dr. Seuss’s work to rap. You can watch the complete version of Reimagine Milwaukee Day / Imagine MKE here.

Dewey is a director at Studio PAUSE, which serves two communities in Arlington with art studios, galleries, and educational centers for the public. Dewey has documented the diverse Columbia Pike corridor for many years as a member of the Columbia Pike Documentary Project. He recently directed the “We Are Barcroft” video series celebrating the lives of several Barcroft residents from different backgrounds. Check out his work on his professional site as well as his experimental work on his YouTube channel. You can watch the complete version of the Columbia Pike Documentary Project Video here.

Above: still from Nazneen Aktar — Like a memory in a frame from the “We Are Barcroft” oral history video series by Dewey Tron.

Above: Still from Reimagine Milwaukee Day | Imagine MKE, video by Wes Tank.

Above, still from Ronald J. Smith — The thing I learned to do is relax from the “We Are Barcroft” oral history video series by Dewey Tron.

Over the past few years, I've had to look hard at the kind of communities I've been attracted to and what I've gotten out of my role in them.

I left one community because I had grown enough to learn that I had an essentially codependent relationship with key community members. Something in me enjoyed—needed, even—the role of "hero child," a dysfunctional family member type characterized by an overgrown sense of duty and specializing in making up for others' shortcomings.1 This community allowed my hero child to run wild. But I learned that I wasn't accepted in that community if I took steps to move away from my hero-child identity. That's when I left.

I didn't grow up in an alcoholic home, but I had enough alcoholism in my family tree for it to have affected me.

I've come understand other, more political disorders similarly. I didn't grow up in a slaveholding home, for instance, but I have enough white supremacist thinking in my family tree—and in my society—for it to have affected me.

A couple of weeks after leaving this community, I woke up in the middle of the night with a sudden, tremendous guilt. I’ve understood it since as a three-alarm dark night of my conscience. In leaving my community, my conscience was telling me, I had failed the community. Hero children, of course, are quite motivated by the possibility of guilt because we build our identity around loyalty to the group. Many other people do this, too. They do it whether that group is a family, a club, a chapter, a church, a team, a town, a corporation, or a profession.

Or even an ideology or a political party—or a nation-state. We may not meet regularly with party members. We may not attend party caucuses or conventions. But perhaps some of the glue that keeps an important group of our friends together is a common political affiliation or ideology. Or perhaps, for some of us, our assessment of our country—an imagined community, after all, as Benedict Anderson points out—is changing.2 I think I've matured and exercised some discernment, for instance, since fourth grade when I puzzled over the claim in our class’s history textbook, co-authored by my aunt, that Virginia's African-American slaves were happy and carefree.

That dark night I remembered Paul Tillich, the American philosopher and theologian whose work was profound enough and accessible enough to land him on the cover of Time in 1959. I read and reread a section of his essay "Moralisms and Morality" called "Moralisms of Authority and Morality of Risk." Tillich reminded me that our conscience "calls us to what we essentially are, but it does not tell with certainty what that is." It's best not to follow one's conscience, Tillich says, when the authority one's conscience itself follows is split.3 My conscience was split badly that night between an external authority, which had been my orientation for decades, and a new, internal authority that I hardly credited or even understood.

I think this split in authority made my conscience's call to me that night particularly strong. My conscience became not my guide, really, but my threshold guardian. I would need to work with and against that guardian and pass it to get to where it was pointing—to who I essentially am.

At the same time I realized, reading Tillich, that something integral to my sense of identity was clinging to what Tillich calls the "state of innocence." Throughout my life, I partnered with my external authorities to protect my innocence, which had been gradually degenerating since childhood. In this situation, Tillich's Christian existentialism was just what I needed:

. . . every moral act involves a risk. The human situation itself is such a risk. In order to become human, man must trespass the "state of innocence," but when he has trespassed it he finds himself in a state of self-contradiction. . . . A morality which plays safe, by subjecting itself to an unconditional authority, is suspect. It has not the courage to take guilt and tragedy upon itself. True morality takes guilt and tragedy upon itself. True morality is a morality of risk.4

By leaving the group that could only reinforce an unhealthy part of my self-identity, I was taking on "guilt and tragedy." But I also was developing, in Tillich's famous phrase, the "courage to be," which he calls

. . . the dynamic self-affirmation of man as man. This self-affirmation must take the threat of non-being, death, guilt and meaninglessness to itself. It risks itself, and through the courage of risking itself, it wins itself.5

One doesn't have to leave a community, of course, to move away from a rotting state of innocence. In fact, one may leave a community or join one precisely in order to maintain that innocence. Leaving and joining aside, the main concern in Tillich's essay is how one develops "the courage to be." To develop it, he says, one moves from what he calls moralisms, which allow us to base our identity on an external authority's notion of right and wrong, to morality, which is "the self-affirmation of our essential being."6

Since this dark night of my conscience, my involvement in communities has become healthier. These communities have led me to new experiences that I wouldn't have allowed myself to choose because of my mistaken need for innocence. In my old age, I have finally sought out many new acquaintances who are not of my tribes. It's fun.

Most people have not moved, in Tillich's sense, from moralisms to morality. Many who haven't are minors, and their innocence is healthy. Many others who haven't are young adults, and their innocence is sometimes regrettable. Many others who haven't are older, and their innocence is often dangerous, as mine was.

How can innocence be dangerous? Innocence protects an identity that society has constructed for me. I cooperate with society—and with groups I join in our society—by submitting to moralisms. In other words, I behave. As long as my personal behavior is good, I can ignore my calling to public life, a calling that rejects moralisms but requires morality.

If my behavior is the apex of my Christian faith, then I can watch passively—perhaps approvingly, perhaps critically, but passively is the point—as those to whom I've ceded the public world work to destroy that world. I can flee immorality as the federal and state governments roll back civil rights gains and publish new textbooks that come closer to my aunt's false view of the past. I can open the door for ladies as the administration destroys the families of my immigrant neighbors. But by accepting the bargain—my socially constructed self-identity in exchange for an unjust society—I am complicit. James Baldwin's maxim applies to me: ". . . anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."7

"Monster" isn't hyperbole, or at least it wasn't in my case. I hurt people. I had to apologize to them for how I failed to act when, for the sake of my identity, I insisted on keeping my innocence. (Of course, I didn’t use such Tillichian phrasing, but I apologized.)

Reading Tillich on moralisms and morality puts me in mind of another existentialist, Simone de Beauvoir, whose life in occupied Paris during World War II made plain the connection between moralisms and violence:

One necessary adjustment was learning to put up with the idiotic and moralistic homilies emanating every day from the collaborationist government—reminders to respect God, to honour the principle of the family, to follow traditional virtues. It took [Beauvoir] back to the "bourgeois" talk she had so hated in her childhood, but this time backed by a threat of violence. Ah—but perhaps such talk was always backed by hidden threats of violence?8

One thinks also of Baldwin's letter to his then-fifteen-year-old nephew, advising him on how to live in a moralistic America among innocent whites:

You must accept [whites] and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.9

When reality confronts identity, the only way out is to act. But, as Baldwin notes, few do so. To protect their innocence, most people will come back into the fold during their dark night of conscience. It’s safer to behave than to act.10

We have no record of Jesus behaving. In the Gospels, he is always speaking or acting, which are, as Hannah Arendt points out, the two hallmarks of public life.11 We can assume that Jesus generally behaved, something most people learn how to do during the innocence of childhood. But the Gospels are decidedly not about behavior. They are decidedly about public life.

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Above photos are of downtown Chicago in September 2024. The short footnotes below refer to full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

Above and below: scenes on and near the Beerline Trail.

What makes the Beerline Trail different is the work it does to bring the two neighborhoods it borders together. One neighborhood, Harambee, is traditionally Black, and the other, Riverwest, is traditionally white. These two communities are working together to turn the tracks that long divided them into something different—into a shared public space with a stage, a smoothie shop, and other amenities.

Above: map showing the Beerline Trail in blue.

In this podcast episode, I interview Ruth Weill and Robert Kolb with Riverworks Development Corp. and Sara Daleiden with MKE <-> LAX. My thanks to them for their time, their expertise, and their love for public spaces.

Our thanks also to Pecan Pie for the licensed use of “Sunset Splendor” from Uppbeat. License code: 7EGXNKOVRQA3CNTK.

Above: Robert Kolb and Ruth Weill.

Above: Sara Daleiden.

I bring it up only because what's going on is public. It's not too personal to share. It's too public to share.

A hidden public life sounds like an oxymoron, and I guess it is. But oxymorons speak in contradictions to get at something greater, right?

I've been thinking recently about a few of the Bible's more crowded caves. One is "the cave Adullam," where David fled from King Saul.1 Two others are Obadiah's caves, where he lodged a hundred prophets of YHWH during their persecutions by King Ahab and his wife Jezebel.2

These hiding places were public spaces. The more I read about these caves, the more they suggest a model—or, really, some possible components for your own new models—of public life in this age.

I'd like to do a little scriptural spelunking to get across these components in the form of ten tips for public life today.3 To see in these caverns, we'll need to generate light with what William T. Cavanaugh calls our "theopolitical imagination." In doing so here, I use mostly references perhaps familiar to my fellow Christians, though employed in ways not familiar to most Christians I know.

But I hope my esoteric references exclude no one. My model—only, I'm afraid, in this limited respect—is Martin Luther King, Jr., who despite his biblical allusions managed to speak to everyone, not just Christians.

Let’s start with what I won’t share.

Tip 1: Be open to hidden public spaces.

This oxymoron of hidden public space is pretty much a Hannah Arendt thing. She claims that after the Nazi conquest of France, members of the new résistance "came to constitute willy-nilly a public realm" that was "without the paraphernalia of officialdom and hidden from the eyes of friend and foe."4 The résistance, she says, amounted to a "public realm" that was "hidden."

One American version of hidden public space was the Underground Railroad, the work of Harriet Tubman and many others attempting to help slaves escape to freedom.

Much public space, of course, still must appear to everyone near it. One fascinating resource for creating open public space is Gene Sharp's 1973 book The Methods of Nonviolent Action. His 198 methods include public speeches, petitions, picketing, public prayer and worship, vigils, singing, pilgrimages, teach-ins, walk-outs, silence, social disobedience, disguised disobedience, nonviolent occupation, guerrilla theater, and alternative markets.

Tip 2: Create or join alternative political communities.

But I think the best public space, open or hidden, happens in alternative political communities. While David was in the cave, his family and about four hundred other people joined him. They formed a community that became the heart of David's political movement.

The church began this way, too. The Roman Empire, as N.T. Wright points out, was as religious as it was political, and the assemblies of Jesus-followers were as political as they were religious.5 Jesus and Paul both wanted to build alternatives to the world's empires, and they started communities to serve as prototypes of God's future rule on earth.

We consider Paul's writings to be influential, but he didn't intend them for distribution beyond his assemblies. He never wrote to the world. Instead, the assemblies, Paul said, were the Messiah's living letters to the world.6 Life and action together speak louder than (as with this Substack) words by individuals.

Tip 3: Don't wait to get desperate.

The Jesus assemblies attracted political outsiders, including women and slaves who were given political power unavailable to them in imperial Rome. Paul noted that not many of the Jesus assembly members had come from cultivated, powerful, or noble backgrounds.7

Paul's assembly members resembled the people who joined David in the cave Adullam: "everyone who was in straits and everyone who was in debt and everyone who was desperate joined him . . ."8 Robert Alter describes them as "men with nothing to lose who have been oppressed by the established order."9

If necessity is the mother of invention, then desperation may be the mother of faith. My favorite Bible story in this regard involves how Samaria was saved from an Aramaean siege. A disreputable, alternative community of exactly four lepers, acting merely out of desperation for food, saved the city.10 Oppressed subcultures are often at the forefront of creating public space by faith.

If you're cultivated, powerful, or noble, find and serve those "in straits." Don't be a revolutionary. That is, don't try to commandeer these people or mold them into your ideology. Learn from these people. In fact,

Tip 4: When standard political concepts aren't working for you, cross a boundary.

Sometimes what keeps us from the kingdom of God is our limited life experience. Jesus challenged the rich young ruler seeking a role in God's new age not to adopt some creed or pray some prayer but to walk on the wild side.11 Join those in straits, in debt, or in a desperate place, or at least those who can't afford all of our dominant culture's means of maintaining privacy and security. Explore real public spaces.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer preached the German version of Christian nationalism until he started hanging out at a Black church in Harlem. For a year while studying at a New York seminary, he frequented and served Adam Clayton Powell, Sr.'s Abyssinian Baptist Church. Far more than his studies at the seminary, Bonhoeffer's encounters at this alternative political community changed his theology and the trajectory of his life.

Find someone or some people, like Jesus, who walk through locked doors.12 When you find them, move around with them and watch them in different contexts. Learn how to network like them. If you travel, break off from the official tour and meet people. If you don't have time or money to travel, then cross your own town's tracks. You'll probably find great subcultures there, too. Political frameworks and concepts will occur to you while visiting other cultures and subcultures.

David could talk with anybody. On the lam from Saul, David crossed boundaries and cultivated relationships with Philistines and Moabites.13 Saul couldn't do that.

Tip 5: Stop doing politics in binaries.

Saul didn't cross cultural boundaries because he was stuck in the kind of binary thinking that precludes relational possibilities in public spaces. Saul's animosity towards David began with a musical binary: after military victories, Israel's women took to singing that "Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.” Saul heard it like poll numbers: he was losing to a new challenger for his crown.14

In a multi-party system—and especially in a two-party system—elections narrow issues down to binaries. In these systems, our opinions, which are the lifeblood of democracy, matter little since no forum exists to hear them and to possibly revise and implement them. We are told to call or write our representatives, which I have often found to be a demeaning experience.

To win elections, parties refine a few opinions, as a factory may refine healthy food, and make them ingredients in prepackaged ideologies. Ideologies drive polities into a kind of madness—and, parties hope, to the polls each November.

The women's binary lyrics triggered a violent episode of Saul's madness. He had experienced previous episodes of "an evil spirit from God,"15 but this time he became violent. He started throwing spears at David inside his house.16

When we start doing politics in human-scale communities instead of allowing others to do it for us through our annual proxies, we'll move away from binary political thinking. We won’t be thinking of the Other as an abstract enemy, which elections encourage. We'll move closer to becoming what Martin Luther King popularized as "the Beloved Community."

The Beloved Community began as an act of American philosopher Josiah Royce's theopolitical imagination. He understood Paul's churches as assemblies where binary thinking would give way to triadic thought—that is, thought that honors the roles not only of the speaker and their opinions but also of the listener and their interpretations. In this Beloved Community, opinions would lead to interpretations, which themselves would be interpreted. The community would become a living political organism, and its members would discover their political callings.

Moving away from binaries can bring hope to this dark time. In previous national crises, some people recognized possibilities that went beyond the strongly held ideologies of either side. For Benjamin Rush, writing the year following the Revolutionary War and three years before the Constitutional Convention, the political cement seemed wet: "In America, everything is new and yielding," he enthused.

The Civil War’s horror wasn’t mitigated by emancipation, but it was attended by it—a result that, Lincoln implied, neither side foresaw at the war’s outset. His Second Inaugural, often considered the finest American speech ever written, recites some of the binaries that existed before and during the war before it gives way to some triadic and theological expression, beginning with “The Almighty has his own purposes.”

I’ve taken to frequenting sites that raise and discuss possibilities beyond ideologies—stuff for times of wet cement. Two of my favorite Substacks in this regard are Elle Griffin’s The Elysian and Peter Clayborne’s Anarchy Unfolds.

Tip 6: Rule out violence and its theory of rule.

David never threw spears back at Saul. While Saul and his army were chasing David, David twice had the opportunity to kill Saul. One time, he caught Saul relieving himself, and another time he discovered Saul and his men asleep. But David refused his followers' advice to kill Saul.17

Jesus taught and practiced political nonviolence. He would not become king with the sword. The New Testament teaches instead that Jesus became the world's king when he died on the cross.

We don't fight flesh and blood, Paul reminds us. But we do confront the dark powers behind flesh-and-blood rulers. In doing so, we wear "the breastplate of justice." We wield "the sword of the spirit, which is God's utterance.”18 God's now-word allows contingency to break into chronological history, a history otherwise written by this world's victors.

Tip 7: Contingency is destiny.

David didn't take matters into his own hands by killing Saul, but he also didn't succumb to political quietism. Samuel had anointed him king, which would have driven most people, I suppose, into either violence19 or quietism.

While based at the cave Adullam, David evidenced his contingent outlook with the care he took for his parents. He asked the king of Moab to keep them "until I know what God will do for me."20 Here David exemplifies both action and caution instead of their respective caricatures, violence and quietism.

David's "until I know" mirrors Mordecai's "who knows," as in his famous line to Queen Esther: "And who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this?" And Esther's response—"If I perish, I perish"21—isn't fatalism. It's an expression of the contingency of destiny.

As it happens, she didn't perish. But she could have.

David and Mordecai anticipate what early Christians called secular time, the break in chronological time brought on by Messiah's crucifixion that permits our public actions to matter. Without secular time, we’d have only the end time and standard, chronological time that marches inexorably towards the end time. We'd have to choose between making history (an essentially violent activity) and doing nothing (an essentially fatalistic position).

If we work to use this world's power to achieve Messiah's ends, then we'd attempt to “immanentize the eschaton,” in philosopher Eric Voegelin's words.22 In essence, we'd work in purely chronological time to end chronological time. Christian nationalists who seek to take over political structures for religious ends seek to immanentize the eschaton and ignore the power and weakness of moving in the Messiah's subversive kairos time—that is, in contingent secular time.

David's contingent strategies for exploring his destiny could be summarized as a combination of the democratic practices of waiting to learn what's next and acting to learn what's next. Throughout his flight from Saul, David prayerfully and advisedly sought direction for what to do next. He also acted and then learned what do to next from the results of his actions.

We exercise faith, Luke Bretherton says, by practicing a "faithfully secular politics."23 Paul offered similar advice to the church at Philippi: while ignoring Rome's offer of easy and sure salvation, assembly members must "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling."24 David and Esther lived this out in the context of earlier unjust regimes.

Tip 8: Use your privilege to subvert privileged power

Without succumbing to white savior complex or some variant thereof, use your privileged position to benefit those who suffer at the hands of the privileging power.

Obadiah was a high official in Ahab's administration, the steward of his palace. Presumably, he somehow used his high position to become the "steward" of two caves, where he housed a hundred of the Lord's prophets.25

Part of Mordecai's "who knows?" involved Esther's privileged position as queen. Esther took Mordecai's counsel, risking her life to approach the king and to set her plan for saving Israel in motion.

Mordecai's counsel to Esther came with a warning: "For if you keep silent at this time, liberation and rescue will arise for the Jews from another place, and you and your father’s house will perish."26 The lesson may be that, if we don't use our privilege to thwart the injustice of privileged power, then we may share in God's judgment against that privileged power.

Tip 9: Learn that anything is possible.

Privileged power often comes across as polite and cultivated, but when the dark forces behind it are threatened, it sets aside its refinement. It acts like a bloody tyrant.

Not long after David entered his cave, Saul incorrectly concluded that the Lord's priests had conspired with David, and Saul had them all slaughtered.27 Deuteronomy's constitution balances the powers of king, priests, prophets, and judges, but Saul destroyed this balance by destroying the priests. When the powers that be feel threatened, don’t rely solely on the Constitution's balance of powers or its other restraints on the exercise of power. Anything is possible.

It is not easy to accept that anything is possible. Writing five years before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, historian Marci Shore described the difference between the Eastern and Western mindset in terms of this understanding:

A quarter-century after the fall of communism, this was a divide that remained between East and West: Western Europeans—like Americans—tended to believe, even if only subliminally, that there were constraints on reality, that borders would hold, that certain boundaries would not be crossed. Eastern Europeans knew that anything was possible.28

Jesus said that, with God, "all things are possible."29 But it's hard to act politically on the hope that all things are possible without first learning that anything is possible.

One quote by African-American artist Carrie Mae Weems suggests to me how “anything is possible” and “all things are possible” can work together: "I knew, not from memory, but from hope, that there were other models by which to live." Tamar Avishai finds in these words "the exquisite hurt of rejection and a revolutionary rejection of the status quo."30

Tip 10: Don't depend on results. Instead, act as a witness.

The Bible's summary of these "other models by which to live" is New Jerusalem, which is last seen in the Bible on its way to earth.31 The heroes of faith found in Hebrews 11 all seek this city.32

One of my favorite cave verses hides among the Hebrews 11 heroes of faith. The cave dwellers are not among the heroes who accomplished a lot:

Through faith they overthrew kingdoms, established justice, saw God’s promises fulfilled. They shut the mouths of lions, quenched the fury of fire, escaped death by the sword.33

Instead, the cave dwellers are among the heroes who accomplished little except their own suffering, oppression and persecution:

They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were put to the sword, they went about clothed in skins of sheep or goats, deprived, oppressed, ill-treated. The world was not worthy of them. They were refugees in deserts and on the mountains, hiding in caves and holes in the ground.34

The text makes no distinctions between the achievers and the cave dwellers:

All these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen and welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.35

None of the people cited in Hebrews 11 achieved what they ultimately wanted, but they confessed—testified by their actions—that a just political realm, from which they had come to earth as exiles, is also coming to earth.

James Baldwin calls something like this the "unwritten, dispersed, and violated inheritance" of Blacks that the Black church hands down from one generation to the next. "To live in connection with a life beyond this life," Baldwin says, is to become a custodian of this inheritance:

So you, the custodian, recognize, finally, that your life does not belong to you. This will not sound like freedom to Western ears, since the Western world pivots on the infantile, and, in action, criminal delusions of possession, and of property. But, just as love is the only money, as the song puts it, so this mighty responsibility is the only freedom. Your child does not belong to you, and you must prepare your child to pick up the burden of his life long before the moment when you must lay your burden down.36

Our living testimony of this public inheritance—of this just city—is the essence of freedom.

These dangerous times can move us to discover this freedom.

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The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the earlier manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

In this 18-minute podcast episode, I interview project team members Sushmita Mazumdar, Dewey Tron, and Lloyd Wolf about what drives them to document life on the Pike in videos, books, talks, and exhibitions. This episode has some great stories and insights about how a living diversity can make public life richer.

Above: Columbia Pike at Walter Reed during the 2024 Columbia Pike Blues Festival

Now in its 18th year, the documentary project has other goals besides letting the world beyond Columbia Pike in on this life-changing diverse community. The project

• Holds a mirror to the various neighborhoods of Columbia Pike to help them understand themselves another way—as a single, beautiful community

• Welcomes immigrants and validates their place in our society

• Celebrates the activities of the various nationalities along Columbia Pike

• Documents the Pike’s constantly shifting demographics and changing streetscapes for future research

Above: my students work with materials on the walls from the Columbia Pike Documentary Project

Here are some resources about Columbia Pike and the Columbia Pike Documentary Project, most of which are referred to in the podcast:

The Columbia Pike Documentary Project website

The Columbia Pike Documentary Project video

Website for the book Transitions: The Columbia Pike Documentary Project

Website for the book Columbia Pike Recipes for Recovery: Restaurant Stories from Around the World in One Zip Code

The City of Stories project webpage

Above: Columbia Pike Plaza

Music and sound effects used with permission from BBC Sound Effects. bbc.co.uk – © copyright 2025 BBC.

My thanks to Lloyd Wolf, Dewey Tron, and Sushmita Mazumdar for the generous gift of their time, stories, and insights.

Above: car parked on S Highland Street

Above: Lloyd Wolf talks to some of my students in his capacity as our Arlington project’s expert (more tireless volunteer work that Lloyd does for the Columbia Pike community)

Sara Daleiden works on the Third Coast, literally and metaphorically. She facilitates Milwaukee neighborhoods that wish to transform their public landscapes. She’s actually bicoastal, splitting most of her time between Milwaukee and Los Angeles; hence the name of her media strategy and production agency, MKE <-> LAX. Besides media production, Sara’s work involves organizational, economic, and community development.

But mostly her work involves listening to land and people.

Above: Sara Daleiden

Sara can feel like she moves between two cities even without leaving Milwaukee. These cities are stereotyped as “Black Milwaukee” and “white Milwaukee.”1 Besides racial tension, Milwaukee has suffered from the end of large-scale manufacturing and brewing over the last half century, turning many Milwaukee neighborhoods inward. Sara and her governmental and corporate partners serve some of these neighborhoods, and their service includes guiding citizens in democratic processes to discover their neighborhood’s public callings.

Recently, I interviewed Sara at her media center in Milwaukee to learn how she helps to create public spaces. Our 90-minute talk was one of the richest I’ve ever had. I’ve curated our talk into a 20-minute podcast episode.

If you’re interested in what it might take to make your neighborhood (outside of your home) a destination for you and your neighbors, including strangers, you’ll enjoy this podcast.

In a separate episode, Public Spaces will explore the Beerline Trail, formerly an old rail line that once served Milwaukee’s historic beer industry. The community turned the rail line into a linear park, which is in use but is still in development. The trail intersects two adjoining neighborhoods that historically have kept apart because of differing demographics. MKE <-> LAX helps to facilitate this project.

Here are the resources mentioned in the episode (and some other resources):

“The Milwaukee Movie” video by Mark Escribano

Black Landscapes Matter, edited by Walter Hood and Grace Mitchell Tada

The Beerline Trail website

Rural Urban Flow’s website

Sara Daleiden’s page on the Homeworks: Bronzeville site

The three above photos: a home, a shop, and light manufacturing near Milwaukee’s Beerline Trail

Static sound effects used with permission from BBC Sound Effects. bbc.co.uk – © copyright 2024 BBC.

Our thanks to A. Wesley Chung for the licensed use of “An Evening” from Uppbeat. License code: TNIQXHGVV47YMDZC.

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-housing building.

The first episode examines the 12-year democratic process that resulted in the sale and, at the same time, transformed Arlington Presbyterian Church from an introverted destination church to an outgoing community church.

Above: Rev. Ashley Goff leads a portion of a service at Arlington Presbyterian this past spring

This second episode covers what happened to Arlington Presbyterian soon after they began renting a ground-floor suite in Gilliam Place, their old space newly transformed. Spoiler alert: Covid happened. With Covid, a different process started, one just as democratic and covenantal as the one that got them from "no" to "yes" on the land and building sale. But the process during covid wasn't procedural. It was improvisational.

Victoria and I interview the church’s pastor, Ashley Goff, who explains the cross-pollination among liturgy, community organizing, improv, and social transformation. We also interview Susan Robbins Etherton, a longstanding church member who helped to guide the church to its new meeting place and self-understanding.

Above: some of the folks at Arlington Presbyterian

Our thanks to Matrika for the licensed use of “When We Were Young” from Uppbeat. License code: QE0XDGAX1L4G84BZ.

Above: our daughter Bethany at the entrance to the church’s new space at Gilliam Place

In the episode, I cite these two sources:

Kohn, Jerome. “Introduction.” In Responsibility and Judgment, by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 2003, xxiii.

Madson, Patricia Ryan. Improv Wisdom: Don’t Prepare, Just Show Up. New York: Bell Tower, 2005, 15.

The idea for Gilliam Place came at a retreat in 2009, when some members of Arlington Presbyterian celebrated the church’s centennial by seeking guidance for the future. During the retreat, they thought that they had found it: the church would sell its building and property along Columbia Pike to make way for affordable housing.

But when they returned from the retreat, the congregation said no. That “no” started the church members on a remarkable, twelve-year journey of covenantal and democratic practice that led to Gilliam Place. This public journey also was the most spiritually transformative experience several people say they’ve ever had.

The church sold their property at a discount to Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing, which built Gilliam Place. The church now meets in a modern buildout on Gilliam Place’s retail level.

This podcast episode tells the remarkable story of how Gilliam Place came about and what happened to the Arlington Presbyterian members who stuck with the process.

Above: Susan Robbins Etherton and Victoria

The episode includes interviews with Susan Robbins Etherton and Jon Etherton, longtime members of Arlington Presbyterian who helped to steer the congregation through the process. Church members used democratic practice that embodies values and skills such as getting to know their neighbors, listening, becoming reflective and resilient, remaining transparent, and accepting “no” as well as “yes.”

Above: Jon Etherton

Victoria and I also interview the church’s pastor, Ashley Goff, who responded to her call to the church at a critical juncture. Gilliam Place was under construction, the church was meeting in a temporary space, and the congregation was grieving the loss of a significant minority of longtime congregants who chose not to accompany the church in its new direction.

Above: our daughter Bethany enjoys the Adirondack chars in Arlington Presbyterian’s garden

The episode explores the church’s slow (but nimble) democratic process and the spiritual fruit gained by those who participated in it.

Above: Part of the Columbia Pike community gets together for a blues festival a few blocks east of Gilliam Place and Arlington Presbyterian Church this past summer

Our thanks to Rahul Popawala for the licensed use of “Bhupali Raag Teen Taal” from Uppbeat. License code: BNS6H8ZOFUKYM0GI.

Above: Gilliam Place from our apartment building (Westmont Apartments) along Columbia Pike

News shows in D.C. and New York City discussed why her pose resembles the reclining Buddha and why people can climb on this version of Lady Liberty. But my Arlington Tech students and I had other reasons for interviewing Landsberg.

Landsberg graciously gave us two interviews (one for each class) over the course of an hour. He spoke with us about his approach to art, remixes, history, public reactions, and public spaces. This 17-minute podcast episode contains a lot of content from these exclusive interviews as well as remarks from Ms. Blair Murphy, the curator at Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington who worked with Landsberg to bring Reclining Liberty to the museum’s front lawn.

Above: some of my students climb on Reclining Liberty during our field trip

Packing up in the exurbs a year ago this month, I took Reclining Liberty's move to Arlington the same month as a sign. Victoria and I would be examining public life in our new town, and Reclining Liberty would be here, too, as a conversation starter about the nature and future of freedom in America.

It was great honor to develop curriculum around this statue last year.

Above: sculptor Zaq Landsberg at an artists’ talk in Arlington this past April.

Above: my daughter Bethany and I visit Reclining Liberty

My thanks to Zaq Landsberg for permission to use his interview for this podcast episode. My thanks also to Light Patterns for the licensed use of “Art of Play” from Uppbeat.

Victoria, awakened, called out from the bedroom, "Put them on the kitchen counter."

A second scene, a day or two later, but this time it's Victoria. I heard her scream from the other side of the house. One of our new mobile clothes racks, a flimsy version of the type hotels keep for guests in their lobby foyers, had tipped over. I found Victoria pinned between the rack's thirty jackets and over fifty pairs of pants hanging from one of the walk-in closet's shelves.

Together, we righted the rack, and Victoria continued sorting Betty's clothes.

Well, said Betty. Well is a fine Southernism—an amused, bemused catch-all. Victoria and I try to help you with Well:

Victoria and I moved into Betty's modest house in south-central Tennessee four weeks ago. We don't know how long we'll be here. Victoria is Betty's only child, and closing Betty's estate may take some time. In the process, we've been sorting through Betty's photos and papers and souvenirs and, of course, talking a lot about Betty. This process honors our need for grief, and we're grateful we can do it.

Our sorting through Betty's belongings reminds me of the team that inventories Charles Foster Kane's stuff at the end of Citizen Kane. Betty didn't have anything close to what Kane has—the newsreel scene, quite plausibly, calls Kane's holdings "the loot of the world"—but we found more than forty pairs of shoes.

And a hundred to 200 sweaters, many of them with their store tags still hanging from them.

What accounts for Betty's clothes?

Orson Wells's movie famously provides a movie-long flashback to explain Kane and his loot. But I find John Berger's novella "The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol" a better framework for Betty's sartorial history because, with its magical realism, "Three Lives" looks both backward and forward. The novella also sets Lucie's life and her hidden treasures, from my way of reading it, in the context of resurrection and political hope.

Nashville: Betty's first life

Betty began her first life when Granny went up to see her siblings in Michigan. While Granny was away, Betty came home from school and told Hughes about a recruiter’s visit from the Nashville business school. Hughes signed Betty up.

Granny returned to a fait accompli and didn't speak to Hughes for days. It's the only disharmony between her parents that Betty ever divulged to us. She told us about it in her second life and after Granny had died.

After things settled down with her parents, Betty left the farm. She got on a Greyhound and, at first, stayed at a Nashville boardinghouse. She eventually moved into the girls' home. On our first trip to Betty’s house after she died, we found photos of her and her fellow residents having fun. The carefree life these photos suggested was a revelation to us.

Above: Betty (in checkered skirt) with friends

Betty would stay in Nashville for forty-eight years. After she completed business school, she became a keypunch operator. Then she got married, left the workforce, had Victoria, watched her marriage dissolve, and went back to work, this time as a computer programmer to make ends meet and later to help put Victoria through college and grad school.

When Victoria was growing up, Betty created a lot of her and Victoria's clothes. Victoria recalls trips to the fabric store and her mom using patterns to sew clothes for her—and for her friends and her dolls, too.

During that entire half century, Betty would return to the farm every weekend or two. At first, she came on a Greyhound. By the time Victoria was born and Hughes died, though, Betty usually took her car. She and Victoria would attend church with Granny, and the three of them prepared a huge Sunday dinner for themselves and, often, for some uncles and cousins before heading back to Nashville.

After Victoria moved to Virginia, Betty kept programming and eventually became a programer analyst.

When we would visit Nashville, or when Betty and Granny would visit us in Virginia, Victoria and they would clothes shop. They’d take Bethany along, of course. In the early years, they'd push Bethany in a stroller; in later years, they'd push Granny in a wheelchair. Each trip, Betty bought nice things for herself, her daughter, and her granddaughter.

Betty's house in Nashville’s Antioch neighborhood was small. When Victoria and I and our two children would visit Betty, the five of us would sort of timeshare her single bathroom. The house’s closets were small, too. Betty's bedroom closet had a smaller footprint than the house's standard-sized bathtub.

As her first life progressed, Betty started taking bus trips with friends and fellow church members to Gatlinburg, Tallahassee, and other day and overnight destinations. From what we can tell from her many travel photos—and despite her small closet—she never seemed to wear the same outfit twice.

Above: Granny and Betty preparing a big meal

Columbia: Betty's second life

In the summer and fall of 2008, Betty quit working and moved into a new house in Columbia, Tennessee, the house we're staying in now. Betty came to Columbia to be closer to Granny, who was still living on the farm in nearby Hampshire by herself but was growing more frail with age. Granny's farm is fifteen minutes from Betty's house. Within a week of closing on the house, Betty married her longtime boyfriend Billy, and they both moved in. So Betty retired, relocated, and married pretty much all at once.

Betty’s life kept changing fast. Granny and Billy died within four years of Betty’s move. Betty was alone again. When we'd visit, we'd go with her to the graveyards and stood with her as she freshened up the flowers.

Clockwise from upper-left: Betty, Granny, Victoria, and Bethany — four generations

But Betty loved Columbia. Victoria and I think that, ironically, Betty's new proximity to the farm finally liberated her from it. She kind of went wild here. She bought a new, red Camry, something she feared her circle would think extravagant and a little showy. But Victoria and I cheered her on.

Her earlier bus tours evolved into cruises to places like Panama and the Mediterranean. Betty once filled in for Bethany's boyfriend on a cruise after Bethany and he broke up. Their Caribbean cruise was probably Betty's favorite trip.

Above: Bethany and Betty (granddaughter and grandmother) on their Caribbean cruise

It was during her second life that Betty's wardrobe mushroomed. The master bedroom in Columbia, implausibly, has three walk-in closets. With Billy gone, Betty filled them all with new clothes. Then, about five years ago, Victoria talked Betty into selling a lot of her clothes in a yard sale. When we came this past February after Betty died, though, Betty had more clothes than ever.

We found around 200 to 300 pairs of pants to match those one hundred to 200 sweaters. Along with around twenty pairs of shoes she’d worn at least once, Betty had around twenty pairs of shoes that she had never worn, most of which, Victoria thinks, cost at least $100 before sales or before Betty would apply her coupons. Here’s Victoria’s accounting:

Betty was fifty when I met her, she was eighty-three when she died, and her clothes size never changed. She loved food and especially dessert, but she was a model of portion control. She was an extra small, and even then she'd tuck some of the waists in. When Betty's sister-in-law and a friend tried on some of the dresses and skirts the other day, Victoria told them to let out the waists. She also warned them about the pins.

We think Betty’s time in Columbia was the happiest time of her life, even happier than her time at the girls’ home. She loved the company of her brother and sister-in-law, who lived nearby, and she made lots of friends here. She joined the Clothes Closet ministry at her new church. She was an expert at sorting the donations as they'd come in.

When I eulogized Betty at her funeral, I talked about her work at the Clothes Closet. But I didn't mention the three walk-in closets. I hadn't sorted that out yet. Besides, Betty was just getting started.

The hidden public lives of Lucie and Betty

Lucie Cabrol is born in a peasant village in September 1900, exactly forty years to the month before Betty. Lucie is dwarf-sized and, as a teen and then as an adult, is often mistaken for a child. She is earthy, even by French peasant standards; she is wild and frank. In childhood, she earns the nickname “Cocadrille,” a mythical creature hatched in a dung heap that maintains an adversarial relationship with everyone, and the nickname stuck.

Lucie owns next to nothing during her first life, which she spends farming the family land. She earns a lot during her second life, though, when she lives alone in a broken-down chalet. She collects mushrooms and flowers in the forest and sells them in the city. Her second life ends when someone plants an ax in her head and steals the hidden fortune she has slowly amassed. We never find out who kills her.

She begins to find justice during her third life, though, which starts after her funeral. She would have no need to farm or to hide a fortune because “the dead own everything.”1 In her first two lives, no one wants to marry her, but in her third life, she has several husbands among the dead villagers.

The next husband might be our first-person narrator, if he dies fast enough. When the narrator and Lucie are twenty, they make love twice. When they are both in their late sixties, the narrator returns to the village after an ultimately meaningless life in Argentina and Montreal, and he is considering marrying Lucie just before she is murdered.

After Lucie’s funeral, the narrator begins to hear Lucie again and eventually to see her as well.

She leads him to her father and the others. The village dead—those who died violently, anyway—are building a large chalet for Lucie and perhaps for the narrator, too. Some of the village living also show up to help the dead do justice for Lucie.

Berger's depiction of the afterlife is, to me, in important ways more biblical than what I've heard in church. In the novella's world of magical realism, the dead don't stay in heaven. Instead, they are resurrected. Like the resurrected Jesus, the dead characters appear and disappear when it suits them, and if they’d care to, they show the scars that marked them in life.

Lucie can appear as she did at sixty-seven just before her death or as she did at twenty when she and the narrator made love. Similarly, Jesus could be announced as the Lion and then appear as a Lamb.2

Lucie’s father Marius helps the narrator process Lucie’s appearances:

The Cocadrille could be seventeen, tall, with wide hips and with breasts you couldn’t take your eyes off—only then you wouldn’t know her, would you?3

Most importantly, Berger's characters return to earth for justice, which comports with the Bible's eschatology of resurrection and new creation.

Something like a confrontation between the popular and the biblical view of the afterlife develops between the narrator and Lucie as they watch the men build the chalet:

I was always told the dead rest after a lifetime’s work, I muttered.

When they remember their past, they work, she said. What else should they remember?4

This memory of injustice is the focus of new creation’s work. Lucie's father explains how the dead bring justice to earth:

We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.5

During Betty’s second life, after helping her mother and her husband through terminal illnesses, nothing forced her to remain who she was. She was alone, and she was free to express her public life in the form of new dresses, pants, sweaters, and shoes. But that public life had to be private. Victoria explains:

To me, Betty's three walk-in closets suggest her longing for public life. Betty, I’m sure, wouldn’t have put it that way. Victoria tried to get Betty to wear some of the nicest of her new clothes, but Betty refused because the occasion was never suitable for them. And that was that.

When Betty bought these clothes, what occasions was she imagining? I imagine Betty visiting her closets, holding dresses and skirts to herself, and dreaming about a different world.

Saint-Just: Betty's third life

Saint-Just isn't a place. He's an idealistic resistance fighter we meet at the end of Lucie Cabrol's first life. That life ends when her two brothers accuse her of making love to Saint-Just—who at nineteen is half her age—while telling her brothers that she was dressing his wound. Lucie, incensed, leaves her brothers and the family farm forever.

Saint-Just isn't his family name. His fellow fighters give him the name presumably because of his revolutionary zeal and his middle-class upbringing. Everyone else in the novella is a peasant.

Saint-Just's upper-thigh wound may or may not have been from his and his comrade's earlier skirmish with the SS. And Lucie may or may not have made love with him. Within two days after Saint-Just leaves Lucie and her brothers, the village hears that the Milice found the two resistance fighters and killed them.

There’s this scene during Lucie's third life where the narrator meets Saint-Just. Saint-Just still wants justice, as he does when he is fighting in the resistance. But death has taught him something about justice:

Who are you? I asked, you’re not from here.

Lucie knew me as Saint-Just, he replied.

You were in the Maquis!

We were ordered to dig our graves and we were shot.

I will tell you something, I said. There were Nazis who escaped after the Liberation and came to the Argentine, they changed their names and they lived off the fat of the pampas.

They only escaped for a moment.

You can’t be so sure, can you?

Justice will be done.

When?

When the living know what the dead suffered.

He said this without a trace of bitterness in his voice, as if he had more than all the patience in the world.6

I think Betty's three walk-in closets are also full of patience, or what the Bible calls the “patience of hope."7

Clothes can be an emblem of hope. Paul compares our resurrection to putting on clothes:

For herein we groan, fervently longing to clothe ourselves about in our dwelling from heaven, inasmuch as, in being clothed, we shall not be found naked. For indeed in this tent, being burdened, we groan, since we do not wish to unclothe ourselves, but rather to clothe ourselves, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.8

Clothing is not just a means of survival but an expression of hope and a means of preparing for a hoped-for future. Paul looks forward to when mortality is “swallowed up by life,” when the body is covered with resurrection’s clothing.

Paul's description of the resurrection as clothing brings to mind Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. Consider Professor Teufelsdröckh's “Philosophy of Clothing,” in which clothing isn’t only survival but also “victory over want”:

“All visible things are Emblems; what thou seest is not there on its own account; strictly taken, is not there at all: Matter exists only spiritually, and to represent some Idea, and body it forth. Hence Clothes, as despicable as we think them, are so unspeakably significant. Clothes, from the King’s-mantle downwards, are Emblematic, not of want only, but of a manifold cunning Victory over Want."9

Hannah Arendt understands the public world as a kind of victory over private wants.10 Jesus also separates private wants from public calling, but he tells us to put the public calling first. God will see to our private needs—including, Jesus says, “What shall we wear?”—as we seek God's public world first.11

Betty's clothes are, perhaps, emblematic of her new victory over want. Like Lucie in her second life, Betty in her second life no longer worked to make ends meet. She helped others with their needs for clothing just as Lucie brings the forest’s bounty to the city. But Betty’s victories were small compared to what they presaged.

In their second lives, both Betty and Lucie had to hide their victories over want. Until their third lives, neither could live their full lives on earth.

And I think Betty imagined, in her own way, a public world in which she and the people she clothed would find or create the moments their clothes told them they were made for.

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Above: Betty. The short footnotes below refer to the full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

The three grads moved into one of the community’s worst apartment complexes and started learning from their new community.

While they moved in to learn, they moved in also to break out of an individualistic, middle-class evangelicalism and to meet the public God. And they wanted to find out what “love your neighbor” really means.

Some weekend street life along Mt. Vernon Ave. in Arlandria

This episode starts with Victoria’s realization that she doesn’t want to live her life as just a spectator. She watches Ethiopian parents and children dancing at her school’s cultural festival, and she suddenly longs to be part of a community of public participants.

Matt Pritchard, a college pastor who has helped to start a number of intentional communities, including the one that lead to Casa, discusses his own journey to living purposefully with others and the journey of the three young women, Dawnielle Miller, Julia Simerly, and Emily Mancia, whom he supported as they started their intentional community in Chirilagua.

Kate Denson, Casa’s Director of Volunteer Engagement, talks about Casa’s early days. When three of her friends started an intentional community in Chirilagua, she was helping to start one in Anacostia and was keeping in touch with them.

Adriana Gómez Schellhaas, a 2022 Washingtonian of the Year and until recently Casa’s Executive Director, explains why Casa Chirilagua as a resource is secondary to Chirilagua as a creative, resilient, and generous community. Adriana shares how living in Chirilagua helps her stay grounded in a central tenet of her faith—loving her neighbors.

An apartment building just behind Casa’s headquarters leased from the City of Alexandria

My thanks to Moire for the licensed use of “Cicades” and to All Good Folks for the licensed use of “What Up!” from Uppbeat.

Looking north along Mt. Vernon Ave.

The back of the Birchmere Music Hall in Chirilagua

Victoria in Chirilagua

We didn’t come to discuss the war in Gaza. Instead, we wanted to find out what life was like in something new to even the most seasoned protester in this student community—an alternative polis to what passes for one in our individualized society.

Manny, a GW senior who was serving his shift as one of the encampment’s marshals, was happy to talk about life in the encampment. We learned that the students are currently living a bit like the citizens who experienced revolution in first-century Jerusalem, twentieth-century Poland, and twenty-first century Kiev.

Manny was also frank about the new community’s struggles with outside agitators as well as its need for discipline and focus.

Finally, we talked about the dynamics of tents, which have rankled college authorities nationwide.

Above: Manny, our host, opening the library tent for us.

In the podcast, I refer to a number of scenes. Here is the video I describe making of University Yard the day before our trip to GW together:

Other scenes described in this podcast episode (and some that aren’t):

Above: Sign at the Foggy Bottom-GWU Metro Station

Above: Victoria on our way to the encampment.

My thanks to Random Rap for the licensed use of “Grandiloquence” from Uppbeat.

The sources for this podcast are as follows (see my manuscript’s bibliography for the books’ full citations):

Armesto, Jason. “'No other choice': UVa president defends decision to call in state troopers on campus protesters,” Daily Progress, May 5, 2024.

Baxter, Thomas, and Finn Trainer. “Police Forcefully Clear Encampment Near University Chapel, Detain Protesters.” Police Forcefully Clear Encampment Near University Chapel, Detain Protesters - the Cavalier Daily - University of Virginia’s Student Newspaper, May 5, 2024.

Granberg, Ellen M. “Message Regarding the Ongoing Campus Protests.” Office of the President, May 5, 2024.

Hermann, Peter. “D.C. Police Rejected GWU’s Plea to Sweep Out University Protesters.” Washington Post, April 27, 2024.

Horsley, You Shall Not Bow, 116.

Kennicott, Philip. “The Power of Putting George Washington in a Kaffiyeh.” Washington Post, May 3, 2024.

Politico. “25 Arrested at University of Virginia After Police Clash With pro-Palestinian Protesters,” May 5, 2024.

Shore, Ukrainian Night, 37-45, 270.

Miracles are an acquired taste. You acquire the taste by giving up privilege. Privilege, in turn, is a way of walking around. It's a way of defining and organizing the space around you. People along your way play along because they have to. The servants never tell the guests what really happens.

Anyway, my school. Most of the kids in the club I sponsor are Black. I'm old, male, and white, and I grew up in an entirely white suburb of a segregated Southern city. So to me my club’s a small miracle. Maybe it's the biggest miracle I can acquire with what little I've given up.

I teach in South Arlington. Here, I can catch a bus, head up Columbia Pike, and hear some of more than a hundred languages. That's a big miracle, like Pentecost.

We're a magnet school. Our students come from all over Arlington. Some of the kids from North Arlington are maybe like me, a suburbanite who wants to grow up a little differently. But I'm their grandparents' age—a late bloomer. Very late, I think, is better than very never.

A few friends back in the burbs think I've lost my mind. But another miracle happened to me here that couldn't have happened back there. Around Christmas, a woman got on a bus and sat opposite Victoria and me. She wore a hijab and spoke to her companion in a tongue I didn't recognize. She spent the ride looking directly at me and smiling.

I can't say what that smile said to me. But on that ride, for me, public transportation became public space. I was no longer defining and organizing the public out of existence. That's what miracles do: they create sudden, unexpected public space.

I love movies about people who walk through walls. So far, I've watched Blindspotting eleven times. There's this white guy who grew up in a mostly Black community, and his best friend is Black. The movie’s set in Oakland, set in the shadow of gentrification and San Francisco. Despite his upbringing, the white guy’s still got privilege, and his privilege bends, but doesn't break, their friendship. It's complicated. And it's possible.

It's also possible, I guess, that my bus affirmation could have happened to me back in the suburbs. But I never would have witnessed it.

In North Arlington, though, I witnessed something else. It was a few weeks before the bus ride. I climbed from a subway and saw this:

Something in me wanted to run. I had to remember that I've been there—not at Hillsdale, exactly; I've been schooled elsewhere—and that I could see myself in the young man. Frozen and frightened before his image, though, I was glad to think that at least for a few more years, at least while he's safely studying power, he won't really see me.

The smiling young man mastering the art of government brought to mind a James Baldwin essay, one Baldwin called a "love letter"2 to his friend Norman Mailer:

"I want to know how power works," Norman once said to me, "how it really works, in detail." Well, I know how power works, it has worked on me, and if I didn't know how power worked, I would be dead. . . . My revenge, I decided very early, would be to achieve a power which outlasts kingdoms.3

Baldwin, in turn, made me think of Paul, who admitted to his own thirst for power: "that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings."4 I thought of how Jesus (Paul's "Him") packaged power and suffering. I thought of how some people, like Paul, have the privilege to choose the package of power and suffering, but of how few do. I thought of how others, like Baldwin, have to achieve the power to cope with the suffering.

I also thought of a scene from Blindspotting. While Miles walks ahead into a shop, Colin stops before a poster in the shop's window. We look over Colin's shoulder at a smiling Black police officer:

Two nights earlier, Colin witnessed an Oakland policeman shooting an unarmed Black man. Miles, the white friend, wonders why Colin, who lives in a halfway house by court order, doesn't report himself as a witness to the crime.

I'm this old white guy staring at a poster offering political mastery. Colin is this young Black guy staring at a poster offering political courage. We're both appalled at the unmasked temptation.

Black man before a Black image, white man before a white image. It's not the color. It's the conception of power.

I’m so white. My students laugh at my daily attempts to get the handshakes right. And I love the laughter.

But I do want to become more politically Black, or rather to operate through something like a conception of power Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres call “political race.”5 Political race is different from liberalism or the political left. In fact, political race is much older and more fundamental than right and left, red and blue. To associate oneself with political race is to be guided politically by the Black experience in America and, more broadly, by the experience of all groups that have been singled out and treated poorly by power structures.

This suffering at the hands of power makes group members more “weak-we” than “strong-we,” to use Charles Lemert’s distinction:

Identification with their local group is the primary psychological resource for weak-we individuals, however oppressed and stigmatized that group may be by the larger culture. A person with a weak-we identity is much more likely to develop a sense of group consciousness than a person with a strong-we identity. The strong-we conception of self is constructed out of an abstract notion of an autonomous self that one then projects onto all humanity.6

It’s hard to turn a page of the Gospels without reading about Jesus demonstrating or advocating a more “weak-we” orientation to life.

While political race has been eye-opening, race itself keeps me from seeing miracles because it keeps me from seeing the context of miracles. Guinier and Torres might agree: "Race both reinforces hierarchies of power and, simultaneously, camouflages those hierarchies," they say.7 If race has its way, I’ll remain oblivious and dangerous, and the servants will play along with me to survive.

Against this reinforcement and camouflage, political race offers a non-hierarchical conception of politics. To operate through political race is to understand politics as "the possibility of a shared, collective, deliberate, active intervention in our fate, in what would otherwise be the byproduct of private decisions.”8

My understanding of political race also involves divesting myself of the wrong kind of power. Whites who operate through political race, Guinier and Torres say, "would start to critique systems of power, rather than seeking just to exercise more power themselves."9 Power would no longer work to organize or dominate the space around each privileged individual. Instead, power becomes collective and communal.10

Above all—at least above all to me—political race introduces one to a life of magical realism, Guinier and Torres argue. They point out that novels in that genre, notably Gabriel Garcia Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Toni Morrison's Beloved, "infuse ordinary situations with an enchanted quality that distorts both physical and temporal reality."11 The "magical" part suggests that change is possible. The "realism" part suggests that change is impossible without a kind of poetic faith, maybe something like Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief."

Readers of magical realism see "familiar things in a completely new context."12 Things like a wedding feast or a bus ride become enchanted and are themselves reexamined. But while these enchanted settings disorient and prepare the mental ground for more just orientations, our real teachers are the characters in these disoriented spheres:

Though the new reality may astonish and disorient readers, the characters in the story react to it with curiosity and faith rather than with confusion, uncertainty, fear, or disbelief. . . .The reader enters a reality that is fantastic yet remains empirically grounded through the actions and reactions of the characters.13

Beloved astonishes and disorients me when, years after her mother kills her to keep her from slavery, she returns and haunts home. But her mother's other daughter, Denver, by finally seeking help from a neighbor, offers us the possibility of a healing political community despite our haunted national history.

Jesus also astonishes and disorients me when he turns the water into wine. But my teachers are the servants. They do what he asks. They smile and serve out the wine with a power that outlasts kingdoms.

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The footnotes below refer to the full citations in the manuscript’s and this Substack’s bibliography.

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 about how this artist-stranger’s gesture helped them cope with something difficult.

It’s hard to keep this artist in residence in residence.

Adam (right) at Innovation Studio with his apprentice and son, also named Adam.

I also interview Catherine Anchin, the Executive Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, about Adam’s accessible art and style.

Adam creates statues, paintings, installation art, costumes, and (of course) drawings, all of which draw people. His art is often complex but never abstruse or complicated.

This episode also explores Adam’s notion of creativity as a means of surviving society. We examine how, except for the privileged, survival and self-actualization aren’t at polar ends of a personal or public hierarchy.

After his six-week stint as the first artist-in-residence at HQ2’s Innovation Studio, Adam returns as this year’s artist-in-residence at StudioPAUSE’s Columbia Pike and Ballston locations.

Adam’s gorilla-in-the making at StudioPAUSE. Adam would love for you to drop by as he works.

Adam explains how he constructed his velociraptor out of discarded objects from construction sites and elsewhere.

My thanks to Cutesy Chamber Ensemble for the licensed use of its “The Sweetest.”

I love Machiavelli for a different reason, maybe for a contrary reason. I love Machiavelli as a writer—in fact, as a fellow writer of political devotions. Laozi aside, Machiavelli wrote what I think is the greatest political devotional ever. His Discourses on Livy amounts to three books containing 142 devotional-sized reflections on the Romans’ political legacy to republicanism.

Discourses on Livy’s chapter titles are themselves devotional in nature. Check out the title to book 1, chapter 50, for instance:

No one council or magistrate should be capable of blocking legal actions in cities

Or the title to chapter 58 in the same book:

The multitude is wiser and more constant than a prince

Must we bring up The Prince? That short treatise, which champions ruthless authoritarian tactics, still shocks. But some scholars point out that The Prince was itself probably tactical: encourage the Medici to rid Italy of foreign invaders, and perhaps the Medici rule of Florence would eventually resolve back to a republic.2 From my perspective, even if Machiavelli were attempting to restore republicanism, the end doesn’t justify the means. (And if that were his plan, it didn’t work, further damaging Machiavelli’s posthumous reputation.)

I don’t love Machiavelli only because he wrote a great political devotional. I love him also for how he wrote that devotional. Machiavelli grew Discourses on Livy from the marginalia he wrote in the books of his favorite political and historical writers. He also felt a constant connection with the authors of those books. He described this connection in perhaps the most famous paragraph he ever wrote, part of a letter to his friend Francesco Vettori about his writing life:

When evening comes, I return to my home, and I go into my study; and on the threshold, I take off my everyday clothes, which are covered with mud and mire, and I put on regal and curial robes; and dressed in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born; and there I am not ashamed to speak to them, to ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer me; and for four hours I feel no boredom, I dismiss every affliction, I no longer fear poverty nor do I tremble at the thought of death: I become completely part of them.3

I can relate. I spent seven years experiencing something like that as I researched and wrote my own manuscript of political devotions. Like Discourses, my manuscript grew out of the marginalia I wrote in my favorite historical and political works. And like Machiavelli, I became close friends—or I felt as if I did—with many of the long-dead authors I read.

I should point out, though, that while we both wrote our devotions in evenings after work, Machiavelli read his authors in the original while I read modern English translations. I also didn’t don “regal and curial robes.” I put on my jammies.

But each day I crossed the same threshold that Machiavelli crossed, the one between work and research-based, inspirational, political writing. And I felt pretty good about that.

Or at least I felt pretty good about it until I read Martin Buber’s take on crossing that same threshold. Quick background: Buber’s I and Thou shears away mere experience from encounters, the kind of encounters I think Jesus says we can have with the Other, the strangers we meet in public.

Notice how similar the structure of this passage from I and Thou is to that of Machiavelli’s paragraph set out above:

At the threshold they take off the clothes of the ugly weekday, shroud themselves in clean garments, and feel restored as they contemplate primal being or what ought to be—something in which their life has no share. It may also make them feel good to proclaim it.4

From Buber’s perspective, it seems, Machiavelli’s and my daily change of garments amounted to shrouding, to concealment. Our respective years of study amounted to poor substitutes for encounters with the Other. Ouch.

Perhaps in comparing a merely bookish, contemplative life with an I-You encounter, Buber nails Machiavelli. And me. Though in Machiavelli’s defense, I’ll point out that he wrote his famous paragraph in political exile. When he wrote it, he wasn’t much more than a year past being tortured and imprisoned. Despite those experiences, he wanted back into what he understood as the public realm as soon as he could get there.

In contrast, my political exile while I was writing my manuscript was passive and self-enforced, like the political exile of most people I know. While I was learning about the Bible’s political activism, I was still acting (or, I guess, not acting) as if public life were only for politicians.

Arendt also spoke of thresholds. However, the same bent for action that caused Arendt to love Machiavelli caused her to speak of domestic thresholds differently. For her, a threshold between work and home wasn’t much of a boundary. Work and home were, for her, two expressions of the same private realm.

Arendt instead spoke of the threshold as a metaphor for the boundary between our private and public lives, and she suggested that courage is still necessary to cross it. She therefore emphasized moving in the opposite direction over our homes’ thresholds than did Machiavelli and Buber. Here’s an example of Arendt on thresholds:

The notion that only he is free who is prepared to risk his life has never vanished entirely from our consciousness; and that also holds true in general for the connection of politics with danger and risk. Courage is the earliest of all political virtues, and even today it is still one of the few cardinal virtues of politics, because only by stepping out of our private existence and the familiar relationships to which our lives are tied can we make our way into the common public world that is our truly political space. Very early on, the space entered by those who dared to cross the threshold of their houses ceased to be a realm of great enterprise and adventures that a man might embark on and hope to survive only if he were joined by his equals.5

I don’t know if Arendt ever read Joseph Campbell’s account of the hero’s journey, but she might have appreciated seeing her notion of what keeps us from public life represented in his writing as a literary archetype:

. . . the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the “threshold guardian” at the entrance to the zone of magnified power. Such custodians bound the world in the four directions—also up and down—standing for the limits of the hero’s present sphere, or life horizon. Beyond them is darkness, the unknown, and danger . . .6

Arendt cited Jesus a good deal; perhaps she also would have taken to my understanding of Jesus as one of Campbell’s threshold guardians. Jesus often stood between a familiar and self-centered private life and an unknown and dangerous public life. Luke at one point offers three rapid-fire instances of Jesus as a threshold guardian of God’s public kingdom:

As they were going along the road a man said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ Jesus answered, ‘Foxes have their holes and birds their roosts; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ To another he said, ‘Follow me,’ but the man replied, ‘Let me first go and bury my father.’ Jesus said, ‘Leave the dead to bury their dead; you must go and announce the kingdom of God.’ Yet another said, ‘I will follow you, sir; but let me first say goodbye to my people at home.’ To him Jesus said, ‘No one who sets his hand to the plough and then looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’7

I doubt that Jesus here was denigrating sleep, shelter, or familial relations or obligations. But all four represent aspects of our private lives. Private life is not what the Gospels are about. And it’s not what the gospel is about, either.

Admittedly, this post’s “wrong way” subtitle overstates the case: I needed to step over the threshold from work to study for those seven years. But when I finished my manuscript and stepped over my suburban threshold for the last time, I think I was moving in the right direction.

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Niccolò Machiavelli (1469—1527)