Sightings Articles
The Importance of Getting It -- Martin E. Marty
SEPTEMBER 17, 2001 The nation and all its citizens, we included, are getting lessons on the practice of public religion, especially in the form of prayers and worship. There is no problem sighting its presence, in a nation that used to be describe...
September 17, 2001
Problems and Solutions in Theological Education -- Martin E. Marty
The classic professions, medicine, law, and religion, have long had distinctive cultures. One shared element of these cultures is the desire among physicians, lawyers, and clerics to assess their respective professional cultures, to look for trends, ...
September 10, 2001
Reflecting on Public School Teachers and Religion -- Martin E. Marty
Hoping to remove some uncertainty from discussions of the legal place of religion in public schools, Clifford Mayes and Scott Ellis Ferrin published a study of public school teachers' "views about the place of religion and spirituality in the classro...
August 27, 2001
Faith-based Energy Policies -- Martin E. Marty
Bjorn Lomborg of Denmark will get good press in the coming weeks for his new book The Skeptical Environmentalist. Like many born-again-to-a-cause sorts, he is motivated by revenge on his own intellectual past as a self-described left-wing Greenpeacer...
August 20, 2001
Drama and the Divine -- Martin E. Marty
Sighting evidences of religion in the theater is not difficult these days, if Celia Wren's report in the New York Times, 29 July 2001, is accurate. Finding audiences that do not squirm when religion does show up, or finding actors who feel comfortabl...
August 6, 2001
Why Secularization? -- Martin E. Marty
Who and what are responsible for "secularization" in the West, including the United States? Many charge that a "secular humanist conspiracy" and "governmental acts" -- especially Supreme Court decisions -- force God and godliness from the public sphe...
July 25, 2001
Finding Religion among Solutions That "Work"
Religion makes only a brief appearance in a fine, thick, fine-even-in-spite-of-being-thick report called Wanted: Solutions for America. What We Know Works. In a page on "After-School Programs" we read that "Schools are frequent sponsors, as are nonpr...
July 23, 2001
Citing the Sighters
Change gives us the chance to take stock of where we are, think about where we have been, and speculate as to where we may be going. I would like to take the occasion of a change in our editorial guard to say a thank you, make an introduction, and de...
July 20, 2001
More News of Religion News
Though enticed by the debate over stem cell research and similar stories, this week we'll follow-up on last week's column regarding religion coverage on national television. The purpose this week is to help subscribers keep developing their own do-it...
July 16, 2001
News of Religion News -- Martin E. Marty
Regular readers of Sightings know that part of our mission, inherited from the three-year Public Religion Project and carried over to the (more academic) program of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago, is observing the way mass media...