Sightings Articles
Did the Anabaptist Reformers “Win”?
Editor's Note: Those in the Chicago area are invited to join the Divinity School today at 4:30 pm in Swift Hall's third-floor lecture room for "Just Reaction: Religion, Ethics, and the Nuclear Age," part of a series of events reflecting on the 75th a...
November 27, 2017
Calvinism II
Editor’s Note: Sightings will be off this Thursday, November 23rd, for the Thanksgiving holiday. Guilt, Luthero-Calvinist style, could be blamed for this column, except that this forgiven Luthero-Calvinist sinner, when writing, favors pardon a...
November 20, 2017
Calvin, for a Change
Recovering, as many of us will and must, from massive doses of Lutherana—after media, scholars, and the pious both among them and beyond their range are doing following October 31 observances—we at Sightings do our scanning of headlines, twisting of ...
November 13, 2017
Luther Goes Global
This week most Lutherans, many Protestants, and not a few “general public” participants will turn the page from observances of the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation. Some church figures—pastors, choir directors, tour leaders, etc.—confess...
November 6, 2017
Repent!
Last Monday the Sightings editor republished a “classic” column from a previous century, specifically from 1999. What was I doing that kept me from writing and presenting a fresh item? One answer could be: I was sinning, so I would have something tha...
October 30, 2017
Killing Religion?
“College Professors Aren’t Killing Religion” reads a recent headline, whose claim is qualified by its subhead: “But college degrees certainly aren’t helping.” Daniel Cox “[f]iled under Religion” at FiveThirtyEight (October 10, 2017) to tell us this. ...
October 16, 2017
Souls and the Guns of America
“Guns and the Soul of America” is the title of an important recent column by David Brooks (The New York Times, October 6th). Sightings writers do not claim to be experts on guns, but something or other about “souls” shows up in most of our semiweekly...
October 9, 2017
Freud and Other “God-Killers” Are Here to Stay
Darwin-Marx-Nietzsche-Freud—dubbable, and sometimes dubbed, “the four bearded god-killers”*—who framed now-classic, career-long attacks on God and gods and religion and religions, enjoy and suffer successions of varying critical fates. We will save N...
October 2, 2017
Nonwhitesome Mormons
Mormons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, represent only about two percent of the American people, but “everybody” knows something or other about them. Ask your neighbor to discuss the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)...
September 25, 2017
The Pope, the Mafia, and the Rest of Us
This past June, the Pope spoke critically of the Mafia, and did so in its heartland region in Italy. He threatened to excommunicate anyone who was part of this international crime syndicate. So here we have the unquestioned leader of the largest reli...