Issue № 0 | July 2008

The Public Sphere • July 2008

Issue № 0 | July 2008

The Public Sphere • July 2008

Welcome to the first issue of The Public Sphere. We have titled this issue “debut,” as it is our very first issue and not quite volume one. Only members of the core staff have contributed essays and art for this initial issue. Each piece queries something we may have taken for granted about politics, religion, culture, and media. Lauren Espineli”s photo essay considers how her trip to Egypt defied her expectations. Valerie Bailey Fischer examines desires to be a Good Samaritan in a road trip through Israel and Palestine. Jacqueline Hidalgo considers how our quests for transformation must be coupled with practices of everyday life. Marc Lombardo traces the limits that our current remembrance of Martin Luther King, Jr. place upon our own efforts to transform the world. Paloma Ramirez wonders how text messaging became an acceptable part of dating practice. Katy Scrogin asks us to think about what we really mean by and want in “friendship” now that we can befriend everyone on MySpace.
Individual authors may disagree with positions taken by other authors in this magazine. We think that such dissonance is central to conversation in the public sphere. We invite you to read our initial queries of public life and then to respond with your own thoughts.

Next Issue:

For our first official issue, The Public Sphere seeks essays and art that query public life. We especially seek pieces that explore the topic of “global responsibility.” What questions arise from the Beijing Olympics? What challenges for global citizenship are posed by the foreign policy platforms of John McCain and Barack Obama? What possibilities and limits for global engagement does the Internet make possible? If you are interested in writing for our next issue, please submit your piece via email in either .rtf or .doc format to thepublicsphere@gmail.com by August 15, 2008. Essays should be no longer than 2000 words. Artistic interpretations should be submitted in .jpg format. Poetry and short fiction are also welcome.

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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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