Sightings Articles
Used — Martin E. Marty
Columnist David Kuo's book Tempting Faith, published today, will rival, on a smaller scale, Bob Woodward's State of Denial as a disturber of the peace. "Smaller scale" does not mean "small scale," since its accusations and revelations refer to the wa...
October 16, 2006
Lawson's Return — Martin E. Marty
Theo Emery revisited the theme of nonviolence in his story on the return of James Lawson, expelled Vanderbilt student, to the classroom — this time as a Vanderbilt visiting professor (New York Times, October 4; see References, below). It's an excepti...
October 9, 2006
Naming Evil — Martin E. Marty
Thirty-eight times in a four-page editorial for James Dobson's and Focus on the Family's Citizen magazine, radio talk show host Dennis Prager capitalizes and condemns the "Left," pushing everyone he does not like into a homogenized lump. His complain...
October 2, 2006
A New Use for "Cults"? — Martin E. Marty
I spotted a new idea, or at least a new idea to me, for approaching terrorism, a phenomenon fraught with religious significance, or at least significance that scholars of religion might probe. This one comes from psychologist Marc Sageman, whose Unde...
September 25, 2006
The Pope and Islam — Martin E. Marty
Pope Benedict XVI has had a free ride so far. Back when there were still Protestant anti-Catholics, some would have found much fault with him, but most appreciated his encyclical on divine and human love, and said so. Many Catholics and non-Catholics...
September 18, 2006
Muslim-Protestant Relations — Martin E. Marty
"Dumb me!" one says or thinks — at least this one does — when awakened to knowledge of what one's sleepy eyes and consciousness had long overlooked. For a half-century, I, like the colleagues of my generation among American religious historians, coul...
September 11, 2006
Heeding Edward O. Wilson — Martin E. Marty
A former Southern Baptist spends her or his post-Baptist years trying to make sense of, and sometimes fighting, the past, and seeing what elements of it might be resources for the future. Former Southern Baptist Edward O. Wilson makes no effort to mi...
September 4, 2006
A Bird's-Eye View of the Badminton Game — Martin E. Marty
The late Brooks Hays once said, "I felt like the sparrow that flew into a badminton game." Observing, reporting on, and communing with scholars and activists in the worlds marked "religious" and "secular" is not as hazardous as was Hays' great and de...
August 28, 2006
Irony and "Islamofascism" -- Martin E. Marty
Shi'ite and Sunni Muslim excrescences that issue in terrorism are coming to be called "Islamofascism" among those who want to see the "War on Terror" be part of "World War III" (or IV). Roger Scruton, author of A Political Philosophy: Arguments for C...
August 21, 2006
Remembering the Sabbath — Martin E. Marty
Sightings of religious issues in public life this week appeared along the highways and in the Jewish weekly The Forward (August 4). Columnist Jenna Weissman Joselit reminded readers that this is the fiftieth anniversary of the Interstate Highway Syst...