Sightings Articles
Exemplars, If Not Saints
one way of finding relief from the attention given to the high and mighty this turn around the sun...
May 13, 2019
Varieties of Unbelief
Sighting “unbelief” is a never-ending task of historians of religion in the Western world. Unbelief, or at least how it’s discussed and debated among intellectuals, is episodic. I’ve been tracking debates over its many forms since the mid-1950s, and ...
March 11, 2019
Catholic Schools Tomorrow
“The then-U.S. Office of Education wrote in a 1903 report that the system of Catholic free parochial schools was the most impressive religious fact in the country at that time.” I sighted this quote in a review of Parish School: A History of American...
February 11, 2019
Blessed Endurance
We’ve become accustomed to seeing “Breaking News” scroll across our computer screens or televisions, usually in bursting red letters, interrupting our lives on a daily, if not hourly, basis....
December 10, 2018
James K.A. Smith's "Cultural Liturgies"
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Michael Oakeshott, Paul Ricoeur, Jose Ortega y Gasset, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are a few names of thinkers-about-history who have influenced me and whose books form something of an unofficial “canon” on my shelves. Is it pe...
November 12, 2018
Really Big Sins
“This sounds like a flip answer,” said Lutheran Pastor Jan Erickson-Pearson, “but why does [clerical sexual abuse] still happen? Sin.” That was in 2002, but headlines still on occasion use the same three-letter theological word to explain the phenome...
October 8, 2018
Dead Lions
The clock ticked relentlessly as a typical faculty party of long ago was breaking up. Senior and superstar professor Mircea Eliade suddenly spoke during the scramble for coats. “Why does everyone talk about ‘dead lions’ with such urgency?” he asked. ...
September 10, 2018
Sighting Farm Religion
“The Ruin of Farm Country,” a headline in Thursday’s New York Times, would ordinarily draw little notice. Only two percent of American citizens farm, and they may seem as remote as Afghanistan to urbanites today. Add in another five or ten percent fo...