Sightings Articles
Cultural Disintegration
“Cultural disintegration” is a useful description of what commentators and publics consistently witness these years. Left and right, liberal and conservative, male and female (etc.), old and young, all observe and chronicle the signs of it. The histo...
February 26, 2018
Evangelical Identity Crises
The champion among contenders for a “crisis” of experience and identity these years is American evangelicalism, which was born from the crises of the eighteenth century, and has been part of the Protestant package ever since. Polls, the press, and fo...
February 19, 2018
Faith and Enlightenment in Dark Times
Tomorrow, Viking will publish Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, from which The Wall Street Journal ran an adapted excerpt on Saturday. To counter the profound gloom which is both fashionable and ...
February 12, 2018
Biblical Translation Leads to Tussles, Clashes
One scholar, N. T. Wright, reviewing another, David Bentley Hart, prompted a response from the latter that the former’s writing was a “catalogue of complaints” by someone whose work “suffers from a dangerous combination of the conventional and the id...
January 29, 2018
Pope Francis Fallible?
Between or after sessions at Vatican II, a circle of us “guests” were conversing with—which meant “listening to”—the Pope. (How’s that for name-dropping on a wintry day?) In one exchange, as my late colleague Robert M. Grant recalled it, the Pope mis...
January 22, 2018
Moody and Moody
Trying to do some justice to some aspects of some parts of American public life, namely the religious, keeps many scholars and reporters busy, and provides a vocation for some of us. At Sightings we recognize that it is not hard to sight headlined or...
January 15, 2018
Tales of the Religious and the Secular
Setting our sights for another year of Sightings poses our colleagues, counselors, staff, and many presumed readers-to-be at the juncture of realities code-named “religious” and “secular.” We have learned and will continue to learn how difficult it i...
January 8, 2018
Charities Feel Christmas Fear
“Charities Fear Tax Bill Will Cut Giving” is the kind of headline leaders of churches and charities hate to read about trends that they don’t like to face, as face they must. The subhead in a story reflecting on the current tax bill in The New York T...
December 18, 2017
The Hearts of Millennials
As longtime readers of Sightings will know, a quotation from José Ortega y Gasset about “decisive historical changes” has been decisive for my own work as an historian. I’ll cite it today both as an introduction to this week’s “sighting” of millennia...
December 11, 2017
The Relevance of Religious Studies
No doubt many members of every profession and every professional (and academic) organization find occasions to speak up and protest the failure by people in strategic positions—in government, media, and the like—to be aware of the resources such orga...