This morning at Liberty Square we had a small ceremony of thanksgiving. The quote from Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail made more sense than it ever has. And it has always made great sense. Many clergy hide behind “the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows,” he said in 1963.

King was talking about space, even then.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/5459/i_was_wrong_about_occupy

The above quote from the linked article starts asking some interesting questions about the role of public space and its importance to the #occupy movement.  It also has some interesting paralleles to the way the church exists in “public space” (ie  it’s prescence “inthe world”;  or “in the trenches”).  It’s visibility in the day to day.  The economic conditions that have brought about #OWS have engedered a group consiousness that saw  a “carved  out public space” in which to SPEAK OUT is yet another point of theological dialogue with the OWS movement;  and I am not so sure that the conclusion of this article is really a conclusion.  I’m not so sure there aren’t further “shapes” for the hospitality of the church for the movement and its people that DO involve “opening up our doors” or even standing with the movement in finding alternative spaces when the “owners” move in and declare certain spaces off limits to this movement.