No longer the patch of pounded earth in the middle of town, is the public square the shrinking footprint of legacy media? Is it the more than 200 million blogs that exist in cyberspace? Is it the school board meeting? Or the assembly at our local high school? Margaret Somerville, director of the Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University, doesn't define the public square and yet argues that it is the primary contested space in the debate over separation of church and state. As Somerville rightly notes, varieties of faith (those unsavory to her -- the "secular faiths" like environmentalism and scientism -- she calls "isms") are myriad and unrestrained (unrestrainable?), coloring all aspects of our lives whether we acknowledge them or not. So why so much concern that the isms are eradicating faith from the public square when she notes that all our messy voices are necessary for democracy to work? They're not the right kinds of faith, apparently. Our laws are best informed by the non-isms, she argues. Which sounds a lot like an argument for privileging some faiths over others, in the public square, our courts, and elsewhere.