Sightings Articles
Many Sightings of Hope
For more than a year I engaged in the visual and oral analog to “fasting.” Fasters discipline themselves not to eat. I chose not to comment on the election campaigns. A digital word-search will find no mention in 50 Monday Sightings of any presidenti...
January 2, 2017
Suicide among Priests?
“Suicide is on the rise among Irish priests” is the kind of report which causes or should cause concern and a sense of crisis among Irish and non-Irish, priests and non-priests, Catholics and non-Catholics—anyone with humane instincts, empathic conce...
December 19, 2016
The Religiocification of Hate
Sightings was born as an endeavor to discover and comment on the traces of “religion” which supposedly survive in a “secular” society. However, instead of sighting only such presumed distant, obscure, or minuscule traces, our authors have often had t...
December 12, 2016
Infallibility and Heresy
Not since certain American Protestants were publicly anti-Catholic, as older readers may remember them having been, have we read as many headlines with words like “infallibility,” “heresy,” papal “plots,” “schism,” etc., as we do these days. My late ...
December 5, 2016
Meanwhile, United Methodists...
Editor's note: Sightings will be taking a short break for the Thanksgiving holiday. We'll be back Thursday, December 1st! Give us Sightings folks a headline with the phrase “Public Church” in it, and we are poised to follow through. The Center fro...
November 21, 2016
A Poem for the 2016 Election
For the very first time, our usually prosaic Sightings column gives space this week to a poem, one rich in metaphor. It was written in 1919, but is seen as newly relevant. Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the fa...
November 14, 2016
Saints Displaced and Replaced
Saints are getting pushed around these years, if they are not being forgotten. Jews may not share the Christian belief in the Resurrection and the afterlife of saints, but few faith communities have done more to honor their dead, especially those who...
November 7, 2016
Reformation Jostlings
On this day, 499 years ago, a friar proposed 95 theses for debate and “posted” them (in today’s world and words), meaning he mailed them to his superior, the Archbishop of Mainz, and/or nailed them to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Wh...
October 31, 2016
Children on Christian or Secular Swings?
Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Pauley is a grabbing lawsuit name for those of us who do “sightings” of religion in American public life. It features in a story in The Kansas City Star (see “Resources” below). The suit has to do with whether c...
October 24, 2016
InterVarsity Blues
The world of Evangelical higher education keeps making news. Wheaton College in Illinois recently dealt with a flap over a faculty member’s theological comments about Christianity and Islam. She is no longer at Wheaton. And last week, the InterVarsit...