Sightings Articles
Football Religion
The Monday Sightings is back, after a hiatus occasioned not by any lack of topics or scenes on which to focus but by the academic calendar at the University of Chicago, from which post we do our scanning, skimming, and probing. Surveying the places w...
September 11, 2017
Closings
Tradition compels us to close shop at Sightings for August, but we hope and intend to be back to greet September, ff., with you. However, we keep thinking of one special fact in the human condition and situation: sooner or later, every thing on earth...
July 31, 2017
Ayn Rand Mugged
Ayn Rand, in the years of her prime, told Playboy her overarching philosophy was that “man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others...
July 17, 2017
Euthanasia, Dignity, and “Spirituality Lite”
Those (of us) who value the ethical but are not ethicists have good reason to pay attention to those philosophers, theologians, and, yes, ethicists, whose vocation it is to deal with values, whether these have to do with ordinary problems and dilemma...
July 10, 2017
The Precarious Vision of Peter Berger
The death of Peter Berger in Boston on June 27 prompts the usual bounty of obituaries and a plethora of deserved reminiscences and tributes. One of my own most vivid recollections of Berger concerns an event which David Martin, his British peer in th...
July 3, 2017
Pastors and Political Choice
“Your Rabbi? Probably a Democrat. Your Baptist Pastor? Probably a Republican. Your Priest? Who Knows.” This grabbing headline atop a recent New York Times story by Kevin Quealy promised a splashing wade into the controversial waters marked “politics ...
June 26, 2017
For Southern Baptists, a Sudden Awakening and Turn on the “Alt-Right”
In a classic essay on “Denominationalism,” Sidney E. Mead observed that “[t]he denomination, unlike the traditional forms of the church, is not primarily confessional, and it is certainly not territorial. Rather it is purposive.” When Mead published ...
June 19, 2017
Our Abyss
“LOOKING INTO THE ABYSS” is virtually (typographically) shouted from the cover of the current The American Scholar. It’s a teaser: the “abyss” could refer to Washington or the United States or global terrorism or… It could evoke Robert Frost’s feared...
June 12, 2017
The Necessity of Bridge-Building
David Levithan, author of Boy Meets Boy (2003) and Two Boys Kissing (2013), will be awarded with the 2017 Chicago Tribune Young Adult Literary Prize at next weekend’s Printer’s Row Lit Fest in Chicago. Many of the bestselling author’s books feature g...
June 5, 2017
Memorial Day, Mayor Landrieu, and the American Future
Recommended homework for Americans on Memorial Day: read, don’t simply read about, the talk Mayor Mitch Landrieu delivered in New Orleans last week. (To make the task of locating it easy, we provide a link; see “Resources.”) As for “reading about” th...