Sightings Articles
Mormon Leadership
“Leaked Videos Pull Back Curtain on…” were six words placed above a New York Times story on Friday. Readers are used to such tantalizers and might ask, “… on whom? On Celebrities… Magnates… Professional Athletes… Entertainers… Politicians…?” Such lur...
October 10, 2016
"Just a Parish Priest"
Assignment: to make sense of this week’s Sightings, please take 15 minutes or so to read Evan Osnos’s New Yorker story from this past winter (see “Resources” below). It focuses on a Chicago Catholic priest who has tended ferociously to the faithful i...
October 3, 2016
The Moment
Rarely does the name of a Protestant denomination receive mention in a headline. Unless an article refers to a churchly scandal or schism, it’s not news. Community-building, counseling and consoling, engaging in voluntary acts of service—activities w...
September 26, 2016
Clergy for a New Drug Policy
When was the last time any of us read of a war being over? The War in Afghanistan? The Culture War(s)? The War on Poverty? For all we know, factions may still be seething over issues, such as they were, in the Thirty Years’ War or (we’ll raise you 70...
September 12, 2016
Moral Injury
Editor's note: Sightings will be taking a break in observance of Labor Day. We will return Thursday, September 8th. Moral injury is a recently diagnosed but agelessly known assault on the soul. While it cannot be isolated and defined as (relativel...
August 29, 2016
Justification
Last week, while the sports-loving public watched timed Olympic events, viewers relearned the values of timing, measuring, and scorekeeping. Some races were decided by 1/100th of a second margins. The substantially smaller, microscopically observable...
August 22, 2016
Success and Truth in Religion
Since 1972, when Dean Kelley published Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, a good portion of the noticing of religious trends has been framed in Kelley’s terms. ...
August 15, 2016
The Mormon Moment and Others
The “Mormon Moment” has passed. I learned this from a book reviewer in The Christian Century (see “resources” below), who criticized and dismissed a new book with a Mormon theme, and then from a New York Times article which dated “the end of the Morm...