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Public Spaces

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by Bryce Tolpen

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16 episodes

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Podcast Overview

Public Spaces chronicles two suburban émigrés' encounters with city people creating different kinds of local, public life. <a href="https://www.polidevo.com/s/public-spaces?utm_medium=podcast">www.polidevo.com</a>

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Publishing Since

12/3/2023

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Recent Episodes

June 9, 2026

Yes, but can it preach?

One day I’ll write about my journey to a loving Black church in southern Middle Tennessee, but not today. My only preliminary today involves what a white man is doing in the pulpit of an otherwise Black church.When I started going to church here, I never dreamed of preaching or teaching. But you know how the Lord speaks? The Lord spoke to the pastor that I should preach. But I told her and the Lord no. Way too much bad historical precedent. People need their own spaces. She’d pause, taking in what I said, and respond, “No, the Lord told me . . .”So here I am, preaching to my friends at a beautiful church.Doing it fulfills, in a small and unexpected way, a longstanding dream. Why do almost all churches resist learning about and implementing at least some of the great political theology that has come out in the past almost hundred years? Are we still intent on ceding to oppressive governments the political callings that Jesus and his first disciples embraced?But dangerous times can lead us in new directions. My talk two Sundays ago focused on Louisiana v. Callais, decided less than a month earlier. We went over the Supreme Court decision’s effects: the immediate gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the longer-term eradication of Black officeholding. My focus was on St. Paul’s approach to the same kind of covenantal backsliding among the Galatian churches.In this video, I tie my recorded talk to the slideshow I was presenting then to demonstrate those parallels better. My talk distills <a target="_blank" href="https://open.substack.com/pub/politicaldevotions/p/galatians-and-the-voting-rights-act?r=2xryfr&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web">my article on this subject</a> and modifies it for the pulpit—and for an informed and practicing Christian audience.In truth, I didn’t really preach much the other Sunday. I taught. As I wrapped up, I knew that the pastor would need to give the call to prayer, to faith, and to action in response to the Court’s wholesale attack on African-American voting rights, and the congregation would need to discuss it. And that’s what we did.Above: a photo from my time at the May 16 All Roads Lead to the South rally in Montgomery, Alabama. Get full access to Political Devotions at <a href="https://www.polidevo.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.polidevo.com/subscribe</a>

April 28, 2026

First class, then justice follows

Arabic is Nashville’s third most-spoken language, and around 80% of its speakers are Coptic Christians. Unlike members of almost every other U.S. Coptic community, most of Nashville’s Copts are working-class people. Yet most of these working-class Egyptian Christians are invisible to most other Nashville residents.This invisibility is disempowering and deliberate. Competing and flattening narratives from liberals and conservatives and even many U.S. Coptic Orthodox clergy members tend to discourage Nashville’s Copts from organizing and from participating in mutual aid.Enter <a target="_blank" href="https://www.elmahabacenter.com">Elmahaba Center</a>, 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 false and deficient 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.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’s Coptic Orthodox Church. Get full access to Political Devotions at <a href="https://www.polidevo.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.polidevo.com/subscribe</a>

February 17, 2026

Copts between martyrs and migrants

The genuine article, and with the video. — BryceCoptic Christians who have moved from their Egyptian homeland to the United States face an unusual quandary. Since 2015, they have become for many American politicians and churches stark evidence of worldwide Christian persecution. But the dominant culture—including some of these same politicians and churches—in practice often categorizes Copts as the undesirable Other. Although Copts practice the most ancient extant expression of Christianity, many Americans find its liturgy illegible. And though many Copts left Egypt under the threat of persecution, many Americans cannot distinguish them from Muslim migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.How do Coptic migrants navigate between these narratives of exemplary martyrs and undesirable migrants? I interview anthropologist <a target="_blank" href="https://www.candacelukasik.com">Candace Lukasik</a>, who writes about these issues in her new book published by NYU Press, <a target="_blank" href="https://nyupress.org/9781479833221/martyrs-and-migrants/">Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire</a>.I met Dr. Lukasik last fall at the <a target="_blank" href="https://politicaltheology.com">Political Theology Network</a>’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 & timestamps00:30 — 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 Other01:35 — 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 tradition07:10 — Her growing relations with Coptic friends and families; her description of her fieldwork, particularly during the violence of 201709:00 — 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 work12:00 — The effect of images of this violence on the Coptic diaspora and on transnational relations among Copts13:10 — 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 world19:10 — The blend of her spiritual and intellectual journey involving her classroom, her research, and her fieldwork, including her conversion to Coptic Orthodoxy20:45 — 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 lenses29:20 — How asylum law as practiced with Coptic petitioners often differs from other, less legible Middle Eastern Christian petitioners because of the economy of blood32:00 — The tension between the Christian persecution narrative and the need for specific harm in Coptic asylum application hearings to create legibility before the law35:12 — 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 Nashville46:12 — The first Coptic migrants came to Nashville to build the next phase of Opryland46:52 — 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 workers47:22 — 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 carriesPhotos & timestamps00:31 — Cover of Martyrs and Migrants05:44 — Candace Lukasik in 2009, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.axiawomen.org/wow/candace-lukasik">visiting around 40 monasteries over four days</a> with a Coptic Orthodox youth group in Cairo09:36 — Coptic martyr blood behind glass at the Coptic Cathedral in Cairo16:34 — 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 rooftop26:43 — 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 outside27:44 — U.S. and Egyptian flags in a Staten Island home29:07 — A Coptic Church in Jersey City30:37 — One of the computers Copts use in Upper Egypt to enter in Green Card Lottery information31:06 — A white board where Coptic migrants take their photos to apply to the Green Card Lottery in Upper Egypt37:28 — “Honeywell Security / Proud to be a Coptic American”: issues of security and inclusion43:47 — An image of St. Mina in a Nashville gas station where Copts work Get full access to Political Devotions at <a href="https://www.polidevo.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4">www.polidevo.com/subscribe</a>

16 total episodes available

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What is Public Spaces?: Public Spaces chronicles two suburban émigrés' encounters with city people creating different kinds of local, public life. <a href="https://www.polidevo.com/s/public-spaces?utm_medium=podcast">www.polidevo.com</a>
How often does this podcast release new episodes?: This podcast updates monthly.
Where can I listen to this podcast?: This podcast is available on 6 platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. You can also use the RSS feed directly.
Does this podcast accept guests?: Yes, this podcast regularly features guests.

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