As in previous years, Sightings will be on hiatus during the month of August as we plan and prepare for the season ahead. When we come back, you will notice some changes to our traditional publication pattern.

Since the founding of Sightings in the late 1990s, Martin E. Marty, the Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of the History of Modern Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School, has been our one constant voice. He has written virtually every other column for these past twenty years—approximately one thousand in all. While Marty is, and will remain, our anchor and lodestar, we feel that the time is right to welcome some additional “regulars” into the fold. So, beginning in September, Marty will be joined in this role by an exciting new team of featured columnists, who together represent some of the Divinity School’s most brilliant minds and finest writers. We look forward to introducing them to you, and we know that they will quickly take their place, alongside Marty, as your indispensable, trusted guides to issues of religion in public life.

As we look ahead to the future, we are also commemorating our past. This year marks the twentieth anniversary of both Sightings and its sponsor, the Martin Marty Center, as well as the ninetieth birthday of Martin Marty himself. To celebrate these milestones, we have made a selection of one hundred of the most memorable and important columns that originally appeared in Sightings. The result is a truly special book, Sightings: Reflections on Religion in Public Life, which will be published on January 24, 2019, by Wm. B. Eerdmans.

The book is now online and available for pre-order, either direct from Eerdmans or at Amazon. In its pages you will find engaging and expert commentary on the many ways in which religion has intersected with culture and current events in America and around the world. Including a mix of columns by Marty and contributions from other authors, this volume provides a one-of-a-kind survey of two decades of contemporary religious history: from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to the rise of ISIS; from Dan Brown’s bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code to a movie about a machine gun preacher; from Billy Graham’s final evangelistic crusade to the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States; and reckoning with the legacies of a Christian ethicist and serial sexual abuser in the #MeToo era—coverage of all this (and much, much more) awaits readers here.

If Sightings has had an impact on your life, if you have enjoyed and learned from our columns over the years, then be sure to reserve your copy of Sightings: Reflections on Religion in Public Life in advance. Help us honor the work of Martin Marty and the hundreds of contributors who have made Sightings what it is today.

See you next month!

Brett Colasacco
Editor, Sightings

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