Sightings Articles
On Rowan Williams — Martin E. Marty
The Church of England today is a weak institution with a strong leader. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, though given few official powers, uses his office and voice in efforts to hold together the polarized eighty-million-member Anglican Com...
February 25, 2008
Growth, Violence, and the Coming Religious Peace — Martin E. Marty
Decades ago an Atlantic editor suggested an idea for an article which I somehow failed to produce. I recall him saying that the magazine rarely covered religion, but when it did, as it had in a recent feature article, it quickened an enormous respons...
February 18, 2008
Mormons and Idiosyncrasy — Martin E. Marty
Now that Governor Romney is off the campaign trail—we don't do any Sightings of candidates on the trail—we can, without commenting on him or the part his church and faith played in his demise, do a retrospective on the Mormon-hate that blighted air w...
February 11, 2008
The New-Old Evangelicals — Martin E. Marty
"Anything anybody can say about Evangelicalism is true" is my take-off from Emmett Grogan's "Anything anybody can say about America is true." He and his truism issued from the sixties, a period when I would not have known about or spoken of the Prote...
February 4, 2008
Virginia and Religious Freedom — Martin E. Marty
In January of 1777 in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a committee met to revise Virginia's laws as it was becoming a state. Thomas Jefferson then and there drafted a "Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom," an antecedent to the First Amendment of the Con...
January 28, 2008
Unjust War — Martin E. Marty
A Stupid, Unjust, and Criminal War: Iraq 2001-2007 by priest, sociologist, novelist, and columnist Andrew Greeley is a collection of 121 columns dating back to 2001, in their original form. As the title suggests, the columns are not long on nuance. T...
January 21, 2008
Statistics — Martin E. Marty
Warning: This "Sightings" may induce boredom, especially among those unmoved by the reading of statistics. Maybe it will spell relief from the un-boring religion-and-politics stories of this winter. It relies upon the folks at WorldChristianDatabase....
January 14, 2008
The "Roman" in Roman Catholic — Martin E. Marty
Friend and neighbor Father Andrew Greeley, sociologist, novelist, and columnist, reminded me in a recent e-mail that he liked to be called a "Catholic," not a "Roman Catholic." In his January 2nd Chicago Sun-Timescolumn, he elaborates: "My crowd has ...
January 7, 2008
The Economist on Religion
The Economist, our favorite weekly (still-)news magazine, published a keeper on November 3rd in the form of a sixteen-page "special report on religion and public life." As many of you know, our Center's early "public religion" efforts presumed that w...
November 12, 2007
Garry Wills on the Abortion Question
"But is abortion murder?" Garry Wills asks the question in his new book, Head and Heart: American Christianities. In this enlightening book—you will hear much about it—Wills explores how the Enlightenment heritage interacts with the Evangelical herit...