http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/ Sightings reports and comments on the role of religion in public life via e-mail twice a week to a readership of over 5,000. en-us Thu, 09 May 2013 13:28:19 -0500 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss OmniUpdate (OU Publish) http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2013/0425.shtml In an article that appeared in The Guardian a few days after the March 13, 2013, election of Francis, the first Pope from South America, the British environmental activist, George Monbiot, railed against depictions of the new Pope as a defender of the poor. Monbiot testified to his personal experience of working with Catholic priests in Brazil in the 1980s. Inspired by liberation theology, the priests resisted the oligarchs' efforts to drive the poor off their land. Eventually, however, the priests were forced to stand down by the oligarchs' hired guns and by their own Church hierarchy. According to Monbiot, Pope Francis, the then-Cardinal Bergoglio, supported the Church's reprimand of liberation theology, placing him on the wrong side of a "great fissure" between defenders of the poor and the Vatican. Joshua Connor Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:03:02 -0500 http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2013/0422.shtml Three "War College" scholars, in the Spring 2013 issue of Daedalus (see reference), discuss some of the reasons why the military wins more confidence than other American institutions. The military is not our subject; those authors may be biased because of their vocation and location, and we may lack full confidence in Harris and Gallup and Pew and other measurers of opinion. Still, even if statistics strung out in editorials can weary the eye, they do tell us something. In our case, the "War College" authors drew on a Harris poll conducted two years ago. Let's look at what this poll turned up about "Organized Religion" to see if there are insights or lessons for those who care about religion in American life. Martin E. Marty Mon, 22 Apr 2013 18:40:23 -0500 http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2013/0418.shtml In late February 2013, University of Chicago professor emeritus Marshall Sahlins formally resigned from the National Academy of Science (NAS) in protest over that body's election of Napolean Chagnon as a member and its sponsoring of research to improve combat performance for the US military. Behind the scenes, students and colleagues organized a petition drive and have gathered over 1,400 signatures in support of Sahlins. However, much of the public discussion has focused on the polarizing figure of Chagnon, a subject apparently more disquieting to many commentators than the military-anthropological complex that Sahlins has long opposed. Kelly E. Hayes Mon, 22 Apr 2013 18:37:53 -0500 http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2013/0415.shtml The familiar "Protestant-Catholic-Jew" mantra no longer defines American religion. Politicians, bloggers, statisticians, and demographers now conventionally add "Evangelical" to the classifying. When Will Herberg wrote the canonical book Protestant-Catholic-Jew in the mid-fifties, Evangelicals appeared to be marginal at best. In recent decades they make the news more often and they are more exploited by and influential among politicians and public life than are the many breeds of Protestants. Let's look in on the Evangelicals. Martin E. Marty Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:24:32 -0500 http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2013/0411.shtml According to a lawsuit filed last month by the American Civil Liberties Union, the commissioners of North Carolina's Rowan County have, over the past five years, opened 97 percent of County Board meetings with explicitly Christian prayers. Professor Gary Freeze of Catawba College characterized these meetings as "religious revivals," designed for the commissioners and residents to give a "shout-out for Jesus." Nathan C. Walker Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:37:39 -0500 http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2013/0408.shtml News of theological seminaries does not usually appear in public media unless someone who is part of one of them creates scandal--sexual or financial, since even heresy rarely gets covered in contemporary America--and cannot go unnoticed and not-covered. This week, therefore, this e-column has to take on a different character; for the first time its editors ask subscribers first to read the longish source, the Inside Higher Ed article, "The Struggling Seminaries," whose link appears at the end of this Sightings, and then read the rest of this effort to provide context. Martin E. Marty Mon, 08 Apr 2013 18:26:19 -0500 http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2013/0404.shtml The epic poem, Shahnameh, a 1010 CE compendium of pre-Islamic national myths and legends, has been the center of attention in Iran--and not merely as the source of the nation's foundation myths. Successive Iranian kings commissioned new, lavishly illustrated copies (for instance, the sumptuous 16th Century, Shah Tahmasp copy) in the hopes of glorifying their own office. The Pahlavi dynasty, deposed in 1979 by the Islamic Revolution, was no exception to this rule. Ahmad Sadri Thu, 04 Apr 2013 21:04:14 -0500 http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2013/0401.shtml Look up April Fool's Day or April Fools' day in Wikipedia, no less! and no fooling! and you will relearn that this unofficial holiday is a time when people play practical jokes and hoaxes on each other. (It's also called "All Fools' Day," so let me play the role of one of them.) Suppose I'd been unconscious since March 13 and just learned that there'd been a papal election. Suppose I asked "you" for details, you answered, and I responded. Martin E. Marty Mon, 01 Apr 2013 11:15:21 -0500 http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2013/0328.shtml Across the pages of a fifteenth-century manuscript track the paw prints of a cat who has first stepped into the ink, then sought to plant itself in the middle of its owner's attention. Snapped by the medievalist Emir Filipovi?, the image went viral, an instantly recognized example of "a long and glorious historical movement" of cats walking across work. In this case the writer was a bureaucrat, working on a collection of government correspondence. Julian Hendrix Thu, 28 Mar 2013 15:28:58 -0500 http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2013/0325.shtml Forget, for the moment, popes and budgets and March Madness, shall we? This week we dispense with headlines and blogs and releases, unless the latter are three-hundred or three-thousand years old. The week's calendar notifies believers and everyone else of Passover for Jews and Easter for Western Christians, plus Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. They have in common what one notices about most profound and remembered religious festival stories. Each has a dark side, a shadow which never permits the observant to settle simply for superficial giddiness or glee. Martin E. Marty Tue, 26 Mar 2013 11:10:02 -0500 http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2013/0321.shtml This month marks the centenary of the infamous Paris premiere of Igor Stravinsky's ballet "The Rite of Spring," the scene of a music riot that saw young concertgoers primed for modernity coming to blows with booing members of the old guard. Stravinsky long claimed that his score, derived from Russian and Lithuanian folk music, drove the crowd into a frenzy. But, as music critic Richard Turaskin has pointed out, the unamplified orchestra would have been quickly drowned out by the audience's catcalls and it therefore must have been the intentionally grotesque choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky, not the music, that provoked the riot. Brian Collins Thu, 21 Mar 2013 11:57:29 -0500 http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2013/0318.shtml "It behooves us to keep talking about the papal election for as long as possible. Once it's over, we're back to the federal budget deliberations, and I prefer a story in which nothing gets sequestered but the cardinals." Thus columnist Gail Collins spoke for many of us. So much of the talk and script after the abdication of one pope and accession of another was a distraction from reference to other urgent issues. No one can accuse the media of having slighted this religion story, as communicators scrambled to forget from their own uninformed guesses and bets before someone of whom almost none had heard was elected. (John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter was one of the very few who mentioned him as a prospect among many.) Martin E. Marty Mon, 18 Mar 2013 12:41:50 -0500 http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2013/0314.shtml That some Israelis might wish to view the State of Israel as congruent with the traditional texts of Judaism is fully understandable. That some might wish to bring Israeli politics more 'in line' with these texts is still comprehensible. That these issues should have been addressed on the floor of the Knesset by a newly elected, secular, female Member of the Knesset (MK) who wants to make Talmud study accessible to everyone has set the social media news networks ablaze. Jeffrey Bernstein Thu, 14 Mar 2013 17:20:34 -0500 http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2013/0311.shtml "Selma: Sustaining the Momentum" was the title of a Dean Peerman and M.E.M. article in The Christian Century forty-eight years to the month after colleague Peerman and I joined several thousand protestors and prayers at the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama. That was two days after "Bloody Sunday," when, in that case, mainly clergy responded to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s call (in my case transmitted through fellow-Lutherans at Valparaiso University). I was back this year, along with Joseph Ellwanger, a Lutheran pastor in Alabama in the worst-old days and a sustainer of momentum on civil-rights fronts to this day. Also on the scene was Congressman John Lewis, who forty-eight years before had stood, bloodied but not bowed, before us in Brown's Chapel. He still leads and inspires, for example when Voting Rights is an issue, as it is now in the United States Supreme Court. Martin E. Marty Mon, 11 Mar 2013 13:10:34 -0500 http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2013/0307.shtml Since the catastrophe of September 11, ordinary Americans have sought reliable and easily accessible information about Islam and Muslims-people who are now their neighbors, co-workers, bosses, and so on. However, an intellectual gap exists between what an American typically sees in the sensationalism of media and where the reality, in all its complexity, lies. Seeking to bridge this gap, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has launched a pioneering project, Muslim Journeys Bookshelf, as part of its wider Bridging Cultures initiative. K. Rizwan Kadir Fri, 08 Mar 2013 11:41:19 -0600