Sightings Articles
The Kingdom of Heaven and the IRS by Martin E. Marty
A Gentile (as in Russell P. Gentile) is the most recent, perhaps most earnest, certainly the boldest claimant, on the government and religion news front in the winter just past. While others have protested along the line of "separation of church and ...
March 26, 2012
Sic Transit by Martin E. Marty
"Public religion," the rubric for these e-columns and the Center which issues them, often gets reduced to "religion and politics," but "public" has a broader reach. Included are, for example, the arts, education, and—yes!—dealing with God and church ...
March 19, 2012
Sighting Religion and Politics by Martin E. Marty
Almost fifty times a year the weekly Sightings by Martin E. Marty appears. Almost every time it is based on documentation from print or digital or electronic media: newspapers, blogs, films, etc. This week is different, not because our attempt to tre...
March 12, 2012
Revelation by Martin E. Marty
The weekend just past found some of the oldest things in Western religion to be the subject of newest concern and debate. One instance: a book of the Christian Bible, the Apocalypse or Revelation of St. John, which is the main review in The New Yorke...
March 5, 2012
Platinga and Theism by Martin E. Marty
Chelsea Clinton, Hedy Lamarr, Shakespeare as author of Titus Andronicus (seen in the family of "torture-porn" art), and Damien Hirst, major-major painter of images ( "dead animals—sharks, zebras, piglets. . . and cigarette butts," according to The Ne...
December 19, 2011
Numbering Worshipers in Boston — Martin E. Marty
Atheism now gets more attention than usual when people measure religious trends in North America. More people put the name "atheism" on their a-religiousness than did so decades ago. For the record, my Ph.D. thesis in 1956 was on "unbelief" and a ser...
December 5, 2011
Tea and Occupy — Martin E. Marty
Twice in the last four years I have spied Benton Harbor, Michigan, a once flourishing factory town that has suffered all manner of ills: bad leadership, racial conflicts, and more. Its downtown is ghostly. The most devastating blow occurred when Whir...
November 21, 2011
World Vision Foreign Aid by Martin E. Marty
While polarization marks and blights politics in America today, and while popular culture, commerce, and religion are afflicted with the all-or-nothing ideologies and practices that prevent the citizenry from meeting the challenges which only intensi...
November 14, 2011
Sacred Air at the Festival of Faiths by Martin E. Marty
Writers who deal with current topics are expected to "declare an interest," which on occasion—today is an occasion—I do. For many of the sixteen years since the Festival of Faiths has been celebrated in Louisville, Kentucky, I've been on the scene, a...
November 7, 2011
American Baptists -- Martin E. Marty
Notre Dame’s Mark Noll, who knows as much as anyone about this subject, wrote in the July-August issue of Books & Culture magazine, “So You’re a Baptist—What Might that Mean?” Answer: almost anything and everything, most of which is congruent with ba...