Sightings Articles
Secular Religious Studies — Martin E. Marty
Stepping off the plane after a "busperson's holiday" in Finland-days I spent lecturing and listening at Abo Akademi and University and the University of Helsinki-I stepped into the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Chicago. There...
November 3, 2008
Bringing the Campaign to Finland — Martin E. Marty
I am currently in Finland, where scholars at Turku and Helsinki asked me to address, among other topics, the role of religion in the American presidential campaign. Having done very different variations on that theme in the United States before I le...
October 27, 2008
Monotheism, Polytheism, and Violence — Martin E. Marty
"Hindu Threat to Christians: Convert or Flee," Somini Sengupta's front page story in the October 12th New York Times, is part of one day's additions to my bulging clippings file on religiously-inspired terror, war, and violence, in the name of...(fil...
October 20, 2008
Another 'God that Failed' — Martin E. Marty
"The Fall: Original Sin & Free-Market Capitalism," "After the Meltdown," and "Government Is Not the Problem: Thirty Years of Bad Economic Policy," by William Pfaff, Charles R. Morris and Jeff Madrick, in turn, highlight a single issue of the Catholic...
October 13, 2008
Popping in on Father Hesburgh — Martin E. Marty
The Wall Street Journal editors had more things on their minds than tributes to great people, given the "whirl is king" world of markets this week. Yet the September 30th issue gave generous and deserved space to the 91-year-old nearly-blind seer Fa...
October 6, 2008
Pulpit Freedom from the IRS — Martin E. Marty
Less noticed than its law-breaking advocates hoped it would be, given the economic turmoil of the week, dozens of churches defied federal regulations and used their pulpits yesterday to challenge IRS regulations, which insist that tax exempt organiza...
September 29, 2008
Subordinate but Not Submissive -- Martin E. Marty
You did not ask to be born into a republic which legally subordinates religion to civil society. You thought that because religion usually makes reference to whatever or Whomever it is that transcends society, society and its laws should come in seco...
September 15, 2008
Religion Reporting -- Martin E. Marty
As we hope subscribers noticed, Sightings took off for a month. This week we are back, "full of zest," I'd like to say, recalling the fun of my Septembers in school from 1933 to 1998. This September you might expect us to do some block-busting ...
September 8, 2008
On Women's Ordination — Martin E. Marty
Robert J. Egan, S. J., of Gonzaga University, started it all (this round) with an article in the April 11Commonweal, in which he asked whether official Roman Catholics ought to consider reconsidering the Vatican declarations against the ordination of...
July 28, 2008
Fundamentalism in Europe — Martin E. Marty
Off to Prague this week for the Tenth International (Dietrich) Bonhoeffer Congress, to present a synoptic view of fundamentalism(s). The conferees are probing ways in which the life and record of the theologian put to death by the Nazis in the last m...