Sightings Articles
Prayer Rattles Speaker Ryan, but House Chaplain Gets to Stay in Politics
Yawn, if you will. A chaplain, usually seen as a quiet fixture in the house—in this case, the House, whose occupants legislate in Washington—was mentioned in headlines last week. Easily overlooked in his clerical gear, he usually stays out of the new...
May 7, 2018
Apologies to Native People
One would expect a headline beginning “A Pope Given to Apologies…” to be followed by a journalistic story which is likely to quicken the interest of readers. Pope Francis has made many headlines over stories which focus on the recipients of such apol...
April 30, 2018
Our Latino Neighbors
Who is my neighbor? That question is asked of Jesus in the Gospels. “Neighbor” can mean someone who lives nearby, and this question about physical proximities and distances gets answered first by demographers. Television in our city, Chicago, once up...
April 23, 2018
Papal Polarities
“Will Pope Francis Cause a Schism in the Catholic Church?” That headline in The New Yorker (April 16) is subheaded: “In his new book, ‘To Change the Church,’ the Times columnist Ross Douthat critiques the Pontiff.” Such an opener requires some backgr...
April 16, 2018
Mormon Moves
Newspaper or magazine editors who headline items with words like “General Conference” or “Synod” or “Annual Meeting” know they have to fight for readers’ attention. Too bad, since much that can be of significance to nonmembers of denominations does o...
April 9, 2018
Parades, Peeps, and Paradoxes
Easter parades survive in classic Hollywood films, on the avenues near cathedrals (which paraders pass but rarely frequent), in peeps, and in song. Seldom is there a trace of connection to the religious event which prompts Easter celebrations. Eviden...
April 2, 2018
Networks and Public Religion
Sightings should perhaps be called “Listenings” this week, as the idea for this column came to me as I listened to a variety of speakers and conversed with other listeners present at a historians’ conference at the University of Notre Dame on “Enduri...
March 26, 2018
Protesting Children
“How Young Is Too Young for Protest?”—an article by Stephanie Saul and Anemona Hartocollis in the New York Times published the day before the March 14 protest marches against gun violence in a great number of American high schools—posed questions whi...
March 19, 2018
Down and Out in Catholic Ireland
I used to teach with or alongside Emmet Larkin, University of Chicago expert on the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, motivated in part to understand Chicago Catholicism, which still numbers a couple hundred thousand people. Larkin wrote much and tut...
March 12, 2018
Chaos
Three Hebrew words—tohu we bohu—show up in the second verse of Genesis, describing the moments or aeons during which “the earth was without form, and void.” God, it is announced, took care of that scene by creating light and all that followed. But th...