Sightings Articles
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
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
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
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
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
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 ...