Governance, Infrastructure, and Urban Activism

Street shrines are an emerging phenomenon in Indian cities as they function well in and around urban public spaces, often along crossroads, roadsides, and highways. Positioned close to the road, street shrines serve both as religious sites for devotees and as spectacles for passersby. In this paper, I examine one such street shrine in Ahmedabad, India. Drawing on ethnographic findings from my preliminary fieldwork, I argue that street shrines create undetected and encrypted spaces—not as acts of resistance, but as byproducts of the city's rigorous planning of public spaces, in the form of what I claim as JUGAAD- a south asian phenomena which means creative and cheap use of second-hand products, in this case a byproduct space. To support my analysis, I engage with Michel de Certeau’s conception of everyday life, using it to examine the activities of shrine caretakers as tactical maneuvers, in contrast to those outside the shrine who, largely unaware of its intricacies, function as strategists. By conducting a micro-study of street shrines in Ahmedabad, this essay seeks to uncover the encrypted places within the public infrastructural developments in cities.

Under the leadership of Rev. Cecil Williams, Glide Memorial Methodist Church emerged as vibrant center for progressive social activism in San Francisco. Various radical social groups, from the Daughters of Bilitis to the Black Panthers, found a home at Glide, and Glide lent its theological and institutional support to such organizations’ work. Building on archival work with the Glide Historical Records, this paper considers Glide as a node within a larger network of radical social activism within the San Francisco Bay Area. This paper centers the early ministry of Rev. Cecil A. Williams and the connections he, and other religious leaders, built with Black Power activists such as Angela Davis and Bobby Seale, and argues that our understanding of radical American politics during the Black Power era must consider the role churches played in creating sanctuaries for the revolution.

At a rally in Ferguson, Missouri six months after the killing of Michael Brown, a seminarian took the bullhorn. Offering a twist on the then-popular chant, “Show me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like!” she called out: “Show me what theology looks like.” And the crowd responded, “This is what theology looks like!”

This paper looks at the ways in which the public-facing work of one broad-based, interfaith community organizing project in Philadelphia, POWER Interfaith, functions to not only “show us what theology looks like,” but suggests two things. First, that race-centered, interfaith organizing can be seen not only as a religious practice, but as a form of public theology. Second, in a departure from traditional faith-based organizing practice, being differently-religious together in urban space is not just a means to the end of winning organizing campaigns, but can also be an end in itself. 

This paper examines the religious roots of growtheology, a term which refers to the system of beliefs behind a civil religion that deifies economic growth and urban development. It also explores the opportunities for a Christian and generally religious resistance to the infinite pursuit of economic growth at the expense of people and planet under the banner of “degrowth” organizing. To this end, it turns to the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, the banking capital of the Bible Belt, to critically examine the theological beliefs behind the city manager’s proclamation in July 2024 that “cities are either growing or dying” (Sands 2024). It turns to grassroots anti-gentrification and environmental justice organizations across the Queen City to show how “degrowth” social movements perform prophetic or iconoclastic functions, critiquing the unequal benefits as well as the social and environmental costs of the city’s suburban and urban explosion.