This session examines the contestation of power and meaning within U.S. cities and how religious communities navigate these dynamics. Papers include an analysis of how the Ismaili Center in Houston negotiates minority recognition through aesthetic architectural choices, an exploration of the New York Police Department’s turn to institutional Catholicism in the twentieth century in response to corruption scandals, and an ethnographic study of how the Church of the Common Ground (CCG) in Atlanta transforms a public park into a locus of healing for people whose daily life is structured by surveillance, scarcity, and displacement.
How can an Islamic building assert a civic presence in an American state known for its megachurches and conservative politics? What architectural language might such a building adopt to navigate sensitivities surrounding the public visibility of Islam? This paper argues that Ismaili Center Houston negotiates minority recognition through aesthetic rather than political means.
The building signals no explicit reference to Islamic motifs; it is composed of cubic volumes clad in white surfaces. The architect Farshid Moussavi evoked a seventeenth-century Safavid palace in Isfahan, Iran, as well as columns in Persepolis as her inspirations. The choices are strategic: rather than a "religious" style, Islamicate spatial configurations are translated into "neutral" types. Drawing on Talal Asad's embodied traditions and Rancière's partage du sensible, I argue that just as Islamicate identity is inscribed in spatial organization rather than visible style, the Ismaili community articulates its faith through civic inclusivity rather than doctrinal closure.
This paper explores how New York City religion, politics, and urban space were shaped by a massive scandal over police corruption and brutality at the turn of the 20th century, and the New York Police Department’s turn to institutional Catholicism in response. After the revelations of the Lexow Committee (1894-95), the NYPD began to identify with the Catholic Church, through public processions, an annual St. Patrick’s Day Communion Breakfast, and a discourse of the sacred moral work of policing. While the majority of NYPD officers had been Catholic since the department’s founding in 1844, Catholicism had not previously been part of NYPD institutional practices or discourses. I argue that deliberately claiming Catholicism was crucial not only for departmental morale and for the spiritual needs of its officers in a period of moral crisis, but especially for cementing the cultural legitimacy of the NYPD in the aftermath of a massive scandal.
This paper examines how an outdoor Eucharistic community in downtown Atlanta transforms a surveilled urban park into a space of healing for people living without stable housing. Drawing on nine months of participant-observation and interviews at the Church of the Common Ground, an Episcopal “church without walls” that gathers weekly in Woodruff Park, I argue that healing is produced through spatial liturgy: rituals that reconfigure public space, time, and social relations into a mobile heterotopia. Building on Lefebvre’s produced space via Knott’s spatial method and Foucault’s heterotopia, I show how embodied practices, such as call-and-response, circle prayer, testimony, Eucharist, and shared meals, suspend urban hierarchies and cultivate Turnerian communitas. These practices generate belonging, safety, and hope, while contesting redevelopment logics that frame downtown parks as spaces to be cleared. The paper offers an ethnographic account of urban healing and a transferable conceptual lens for studying how liturgy makes place.