Sightings Articles
What Is Truth in Recent Claims about Christian Origins?
Yes, it is the run up to Easter, 2006....
April 13, 2006
Wills's Jesus -- Martin E. Marty
"Jesus, Jesus and More Jesus ... Jesus is all the rage in the media these days," writes Lynn Garrett in Publishers Weekly Religion BookLine. She's right. You can save time by reading Garry Wills's terse What Jesus Meant, a typical Willsian "makes you...
April 10, 2006
Immigration and the Changing Contours of Religious Pluralism in the United States -- Andrea Althoff
In the United States today, Latin Americans, mainly Mexicans, constitute the largest number of immigrants, and this majority puts them at the center of debates regarding integration into U.S. civil society. Parties to these debates often regard immig...
April 6, 2006
Robinson and Mainline Protestantism -- Martin E. Marty
"A liberal," poet Robert Frost wrote, "is a man"—or a woman—"too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel." My corollary observation: "Mainline Protestants are too complacent to make a defense or counterattack when chided or derided." Catholics ...
April 3, 2006
Northern Uganda's War-Sick Children Move into the Media Spotlight -- Rosalind I. J. Hackett
After years of neglect and obscurity, the plight of Northern Uganda's war-sick children is finally becoming a global media item. Journalists and filmmakers are vying for the most apposite epithet —abducted, lost, stolen, invisible, forgotten—to descr...
March 30, 2006
Building Moral Values -- Martin E. Marty
Right-wing talk shows are not part of my "hearings," so they do not usually make these "sightings." Still, I found something relevant in "QT," Zay N. Smith's column of quotes in the Chicago Sun-Times (March 21). Under the heading "Is a Justice of the...
March 27, 2006
The Prophetic Pathos of Crash -- John W. Vest
As usual, there was not an abundance of God-talk or religion in this year's Academy Awards ceremony. In fact, the only religious reference I can recall was a "Thank you, Jesus" from one of the artists responsible for the Oscar-winning theme "It's Har...
March 23, 2006
Resisting "Theocracy" -- Martin E. Marty
In his new book, Baptizing America, Rabbi James Rudin speaks of a developing American "Christocracy." Kevin Phillips, in American Theocracy, writes about a developing "theocracy." Rudin is a moderate and Phillips has carefully detailed his own odysse...
March 20, 2006
Voting as a Lenten Discipline -- David A. Hoekema
March 1 was a national holiday here in South Africa, but not because it was Ash Wednesday. Rather, it was the day of municipal elections across the country and, as is common practice in African nations, normal business was suspended to encourage all ...
March 16, 2006
Protestantism and Power -- Martin E. Marty
"Lessons of the old mainline for the new mainline" headlines the guest column in the conservative-to-moderate Christianity Today (March 2006). Speaking up for the "old" is Jason Byassee, a youngish editor of the moderate-to-liberal Christian Century....