Sightings Articles
Multiple Choices from the Founders -- Martin E. Marty
The "Founding Fathers," or "Founders," are getting worked over in public affairs, and especially in religious matters, more than ever before. With courts wrestling with issues of church and state, educators fighting over ways to treat faith and faith...
October 31, 2005
Running the Show -- Martin E. Marty
This is not a column about who should be on the U. S. Supreme Court. It is about how various religious groups in pluralist America, this time particularly the agents of the Christian Right, conceive their contributions and hoped-for payoffs. It is oc...
October 17, 2005
Marathon Day -- Martin E. Marty
Yesterday, 40,000 atheists, agnostics, Muslims, Jews, and secularists gathered on the lakefront in our city for a sacred tribal rite. And seventy-four days from now, thousands will gather at a huge theater near the lakeshore to celebrate another rite...
October 10, 2005
Schadenfreude -- Martin E. Marty
"Should I feel bad that I feel good when bad things happen to other people?" That is a paraphrase of friends' inquiries in recent weeks. "Other people" here does not refer to just "any people." If it did, feeling thus would be a big sin over which on...
October 3, 2005
What's the Count? -- Martin E. Marty
I should know better, and even do know better, than to pass on brief comment about religious statistics. Demographers and statisticians come in many forms from many schools with many methods, and they question and correct each other and those of us w...
September 26, 2005
Control Issues -- Martin E. Marty
Twice a year, two-score Midwest historians of Christianity, more of them Roman Catholic than not, gather at the Cushwa Center at the University of Notre Dame. We celebrate and criticize one book each meeting. This time it was Catholic University of A...
September 19, 2005
Members One of Another -- Martin E. Marty
For once, a homily seems in order in Sightings. Sermons need texts; this one is from Ephesians 4:25. Type the phrase "we are members one of another" into your Internet search engine, and you'll sight 23,800 uses of the phrase -- or at least mine foun...
September 12, 2005
Understanding Modern Jihad -- Martin E. Marty
Today Sightings will pass over the much-sighted Pat Robertson, Cindy Sheehan, and Supreme Court issues to appraise the mind-set of jihadists. Max Rodenbeck, who covers the Middle East for the not-leftist British Economist, evaluates six new books (fo...
August 29, 2005
Thinking Inside the Mailbox -- Martin E. Marty
"Putting Jesus in Every Mailbox." That headline on a story by Shaila Dewan (New York Times, August 16) provides an opportunity for us to try to make a point about religion in public life. First, to crib from the Dewan report on the Jesus Video Projec...
August 22, 2005
Doctors' Report -- Martin E. Marty
Follow-up research informs me that news of a survey in the July issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine could be glimpsed on cable TV and got some notice in newspapers, but it created less stir than one might have imagined. Only when I scoo...