Sightings Articles
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Transitioning Out of Mediocrity
Cisgender dysphoria, transgender identity, etc., were not part of my formal curriculum in theology or religious studies, which ended at 3:00 p.m. on graduation day, December 14th, 1956. The earliest known use of the term “transgender” was in 1974, an...
March 13, 2017
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Alien Citizens
NOT BREAKING NEWS! Overdosed on “Breaking News,” which in the case of religion usually means news of clerical sex scandals, parochial embezzlements, or stories of some Evangelicals acting unevangelically, Sightings sometimes likes to train its sights...
March 6, 2017
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The Church Militant
Headlines in the Detroit Free Press, which reached us recently via USA Today, and the Chicago Sun-Times, from the second-to-last day of last year, were wake-up alarms alerting readers to yet another extremist group of the sort that prospers in these ...
February 27, 2017
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Benedict, Not Benedictine
Editor's note: Last Thursday's piece by Rachel Fulton Brown provoked a great deal of discussion. Some of those who have written to express their consternation have urged Sightings to "disavow" the piece and remove it from the Marty Center's "platform...
February 20, 2017
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Sacred Sites Violated
What if the Sioux Nation decided to build a pipeline through Arlington Cemetery? This question from Faith Spotted Eagle—who lacks a Ph.D. in comparative religion and who would never be employed to teach the phenomenology of burial ritual—got at the h...
February 13, 2017
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What's Ressentiment Got to Do with It
Should our republic and, with it, its kin in Western Europe survive, any and all attempts to transcend the current chaos will have to begin with, or at least include, diagnosis and analysis of what got us here. Whoever reads the internet messages, ed...
February 6, 2017
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Religious Art Discovered Alive!
No “-scope,” either “micro-“ or “tele-,” was needed last week for us to sight an article written “as if” for Sightings, so bold was its headline, so appropriate to be appropriated by this column on “religion in public life,” given our focus on art an...
January 30, 2017
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Carrying On or The Little Man Who Wasn't There
Sightings looks for meaning in the abyss of chaos that currently challenges American, and global, culture. The experience of life in its shadows led me to remember “Antigonish,” an old poem (1899) by Hughes Mearns. Some readers may welcome an audio b...
January 23, 2017
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Furies over Immigration
When writing for Sightings I can look down from our residence window on two cathedral towers. A century ago, in the years after the Chicago Fire of 1871, those towers towered over a rebuilt cityscape, still of low-rise buildings. Cathedrals dominated...
January 16, 2017
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The Metaphysical Moment
Citings of Sightings, in which we sometimes indulge, can be signs of narcissism, impoverished imagination, or a lack of research in quest of fresh things to say. But sometimes quotations of earlier columns—now archived, lost in cyberspace, or almost ...