Sightings Articles
Critique of Purity
At the time of this writing, the partial government shutdown, now the longest in U.S. history, is entering its fifth week. President Trump once declared he would “proudly” take responsibility (bear the “mantle”) for the shutdown. But in characteristi...
January 24, 2019
The Simple Eye: Vivian Maier's Photographic Mysticism by Jeremy Biles
Currently on display at the Chicago Cultural Center are Vivian Maier’s street photographs, which are generating enormous excitement not only in Chicago, but internationally. A self-taught photographer, Maier's work exhibits an outward-turned attitude...
March 10, 2011
The Politics of Wounding — Jeremy Biles
Sightings recently reported on artist and gay-rights activist David Wojnarowicz’s 1987 video “A Fire in My Belly,” which was pulled from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in response to pressure from conservative politicians and relig...
January 13, 2011
Fire and Fraud: Touchdown Jesus Meets the Cult of Pain by Jeremy Biles
I recalled C. G. Jung’s definition of “synchronicity” last week when two email messages, each containing a link to a religion news story, arrived to my inbox almost simultaneously. Synchronicity refers to “temporally coincident occurrences of acausa...
June 24, 2010
The New Religion of Body Improvement by Jeremy Biles
“The worldwide pursuit of body improvement has become like a new religion,” says photographer Zed Nelson in the introduction to his latest book, Love Me. His photos therein depict in loving, lurid detail evidences of bodily fanaticism around the glo...
May 27, 2010
Form Follows Dysfuntion by Jeremy Biles
Currently on display at the Chicago Cultural Center is an exhibition of artist Christine Tarkowski’s work entitled “Last Things Will Be First and First Things Will Be Last.” Like much of the artist’s previous work, some of the pieces in this show ar...
March 25, 2010
Crush Videos, the Human Sacrifice Channel, and Other Religious Horribles — Jeremy Biles
A previously obscure sect of sexual fetishism with enigmatic religious dimensions was exposed to the full light of the media last week, as the Supreme Court began deliberations on U.S. vs. Stevens. The case centers on a 1999 statute making it illegal...
October 15, 2009
Crash: Apocalypse and Prophecy In, With, and Through J. G. Ballard by Jeremy Biles
That writer J. G. Ballard died this past Sunday, in the midst of the global economic crash, makes perfectly sad sense. Ballard was a harbinger of an apocalypse brought on by unrestrained commercialization, and a prophetic voice for both the possibil...
April 23, 2009
The Persistence of Eliade's Memory — Jeremy Biles
Released this week on DVD, Francis Ford Coppola's film Youth Without Youth, based on the novella of the same name by celebrated historian of religions Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), opens with a montage of clocks woozily stretching and bending. These flu...
May 8, 2008
Reflections on Chicago's "Cloud Gate" — Jeremy Biles
April 22 will mark the twentieth anniversary of the death of Mircea Eliade, prodigious writer of novels, articles, journals, and numerous scholarly books in comparative religion. Eliade was also a "founding father" of the history of religions discipl...