Issue № 1 | September 2008

The Public Sphere • September 2008

Issue № 1 | September 2008

The Public Sphere • September 2008

Welcome to the first official issue of The Public Sphere. We have titled this issue “Global Responsibility.” After a summer of Olympics in China, hurricanes in the Caribbean, snide repartee between Vladimir Putin and Dick Cheney, and the official start of the presidential election campaigns, it is time to reflect on what it means to be responsible in our actions towards the world. While every piece may focus on something more local, each piece still queries something we may have taken for granted about politics, religion, culture, and media. Valerie Bailey reflects on the Sarah Palin as archetype within conservative evangelical Christian subculture. John Cochran‘s essay discusses how one manages the climate crisis through a transformation of consciousness. David Dault examines the dissolution of medical ethics in the midst of the U.S. healthcare crisis. Jacqueline Hidalgo‘s photo essay presents images of U.S. religious life found along the road side when traveling from California to New York, while Marc Lombardo diagnoses the disease of U.S. democracy. Sourena Mohammadi‘s photo essay excavates the complex relationships between martyrdom and culture in Iran, and Paloma Ramirez remains indignant over New York City’s attempt to control her eating habits. Finally, Katy Scrogin asks us to reconsider if economic growth can really measure the health of U.S. society.

Individual authors may disagree with each other’s positions in this magazine-a dissonance that we believe is central to conversation in the public sphere. We invite you to read our queries of public life, and then to respond with your own thoughts.

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Hockey Moms, Prayer Nazis, and Why I Love But Fear People Like Sarah PalinRemember that really nice girl who greeted you warmly as a potential friend when you first arrived at college? Remember how she conscientiously invited you to dinner, or to study, or to her Christian fellowship activity? Remember the conversations about religion that you thought were a precursor to sharing secrets among friends? But then you expressed a different opinion, or you joined a liberal club, or you started to explore your sexuality, and suddenly, you felt a sharp pain in your back? Betrayed by some evangelical whom you thought was a friend?
Your 258 Closest FriendsAn acquaintance of mine claims to have 258 friends. That number could be larger, actually; the figure only represents the number of boon companions who show up on her MySpace page and not those additional pals who might appear in real time but avoid online social networking.
The Church Needs a New Confession: Pathetic-ness as Moral FailingOvert evil is easy to discuss. It’s banal evil that is hard to acknowledge. And you can’t confess to a sin until that sin has been acknowledged. Churches spent the rest of the twentieth century acknowledging the sins of genocide. However, in her writings, Hannah Arendt, who witnessed the trials against the Nazis, wrote about how the Nazi war criminals resisted acknowledging that their boring, nine-to-five office jobs of record keeping or laboratory work on the use of chemicals in the gas chambers had actually been evil. In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt chronicles the wartime activities and trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, who claimed that he was only doing his bureaucratic job as a transportation logician.
Missing the Good Samaritan on the Present-Day Road to JerichoThis year, while serving as a chaperone for college students on a nearly two-week trip to the Holy Land, our Palestinian tour guide pointed out that our bus was now on the Road to Jericho. I sat up in shock; the Jericho Road had now become real and covered in asphalt. I looked at the road, stunned at how much it looked like the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Except, in the middle of the road was a huge concrete wall that seemed to stretch almost ten stories into the sky.

The New, Hard Work of PlayPerhaps we would all enjoy ourselves more... if we let kids be kids when and in the places they need to be kids, and parents be adults when and in the places they need to be adults.
What We Lose When We Lose GodAO Scott has recently proposed that we are living in a post-partiarchal age that is also the end of adulthood. Here I want to suggest that the death of God continues to be a more fundamental liberating loss of our cultural moment.
Red Baiting MandelaIn the wake of Nelson Mandela’s death in 2013, a small, but vocal, number of critics decided to pull out an old canard about his affiliation with Communism.
Howling AgainIt would be wrong, wouldn’t it<br> to ask for sacrificial stand-ins<br> cheap substitutes

franzI appreciate your insight and your depthful writin
LeahGreat blog!
Graffiti SuppliesShooting kids for doing graffiti on the walls is a
SaoirseThank you, Prof. Fahs, for a succinct analysis of

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