Sightings Articles
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Styron’s Nat Turner Turns 50, Gets Religion
Fifty years ago this month, William Styron published The Confessions of Nat Turner—an historical novel that became a flashpoint for arguments about race and representation during a particularly trying period of U.S. history. Styron, a white Virginian...
October 12, 2017
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Taking Exception: How Muhammad Ali Transformed American Religion
The morning after he defeated Sonny Liston for the world’s heavyweight boxing championship in February, 1964, Cassius Clay confirmed that he was a Muslim, a convert to Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam. To a reporter who referred to him as a “card-ca...
June 9, 2016
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Death Gospel and the Heart of Saturday Night
The recent release of Adam Arcuragi's album Like a Fire that Consumes All Before It... has raised interest in the popular-musical category of "Death Gospel," a metaphysically attuned variety of the Americana genre named by Arcuragi. Death Gospel is n...
February 9, 2012
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Updike's Motions of Grace
John Updike, who died last week at 76, has found valediction in the interim as a literary giant-a novelist and short story writer, a poet, and a critic. Chicago Tribune culture writer Julia Keller places him in a foursome with Norman Mailer, Phillip...
February 5, 2009
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E Pluribus Obama
In the November 6th New York Times, photographer Matt Mendelsohn describes a restlessness that overcame him on election night, leading him to drive across the Potomac to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, "expecting to find a crowd and some news...
November 13, 2008
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Religion in Modern Times
While it may not constitute as momentous a cultural event as it would have thirty years ago, Bob Dylan will release Modern Times, a new album of ten original songs, on August 29. Early reports and "leaked" online audio fragments indicate that Modern ...