Sightings Articles
The Decline of Denominational Publishing by Martin E. Marty
"Christian Book Expo Attracts Few Customers," headlines Marcia Z. Nelson in the March 23rd Publishers Weekly. This is overlookable news to most Americans who have little interest in Evangelicalism and its books, but it has portents for all kinds of c...
March 30, 2009
The Decline of the Culture Wars by Martin E. Marty
Eight days ago columnist Frank Rich in the New York Times joined the company of those who note, as his headline says, that "The Culture Warriors Get Laid Off." He wrote of the "upside to the economic meltdown," one which allows citizens to get serio...
March 23, 2009
Economics by Martin E. Marty
Virtually every church newsletter, denominational web-site, religious periodical, or other medium, disseminated in print or electronically, makes some reference to the economic situation in which all classes of Americans find themselves today. Local ...
March 16, 2009
Mainline Clergy by Martin E. Marty
While the number of Americans coded as "Mainline Protestant" has gone down (almost) twenty percent in (almost) fifty years, still (almost) one in five Americans and (almost) one in four voters are part of this often (almost) invisible cohort which re...
March 9, 2009
Evangelicals and the Environment by Martin E. Marty
This one needs an introduction: Years ago at scholarly evangelical gatherings I would be introduced as "this year's non-evangelical speaker", to which I'd respond with a reminder, "I'm the only person in this room who even belongs to a church body n...
March 2, 2009
Commodification by Martin E. Marty
The Pope (John Paul II) was right. The World Council of Churches was right. The preacher down the block was right. The "moderate evangelicals" were right. The first had a perfect record against collectivization; the second had a mixed record, but...
February 23, 2009
Interreligion by Martin E. Marty
"Brotherhood Week": Is there still such an observance? I Googled, and came up with scores of versions, sung and printed, of Tom Lehrer's delightfully cynical or cynically delightful song of satire about the prejudices and hatreds that were disguise...
February 16, 2009
Wallstreet by Martin E. Marty
This week's collage of Wall Street Journal headlines, none of them explicitly but all of them implicitly evoking "public religion" themes, is broken up by passages from the King James Version of the Bible, and from me - my attempts to see if we can f...
February 9, 2009
Pope Benedict and the Jews — Martin E. Marty
On January 22, responding to a post-speech questioner at St. Scholastica College in Duluth, which is (roughly) twenty-four percent Catholic and sixteen percent Lutheran, I observed that American Catholic criticisms of Pope Benedict XVI have often bee...
February 2, 2009
Inaugural Jesus — Martin E. Marty
The apostle Paul claimed that Jesus, in the form of "Christ crucified," was "a stumbling block [skandalon=scandal=offence] to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles." (I Corinthians 1:23) Jews+Gentiles=pretty much everybody. You may ask, "What is Jesus d...