Sightings Articles
Counterculture Shock -- Martin E. Marty
The Chicago Reader lets me assess the young adult culture weekly; the free newspaper in your city will give you access to the same. Please be patient while, for effect, I string together words and images at the heart of that culture. You'd expect to ...
March 6, 2006
The Meaning of Munich -- Jerome Eric Copulsky
Three days from now, the annual ritual of the Academy Awards will be performed. Steven Spielberg's movie Munich, which depicts the exploits of a team of Israeli assassins sent to avenge the murder of eleven athletes by Black September at the 1972 Mun...
March 2, 2006
Doubting Dennett -- Martin E. Marty
Last year it was Sam Harris's The End of Faith; this year it is Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon that sets out to rally the anti-religious, and serves to fire up some defenders of religion. Neither lacks notice...
February 27, 2006
Religious Freedom in a Time of Domestic Surveillance -- Jonathan Rothchild
The legal limits of mechanisms designed to confront the new paradigm of the war on terror have been the subject of many recent debates. These debates initially focused on prisoner treatment, interrogation practices, and extraordinary rendition. They ...
February 23, 2006
Hoping in Pope Benedict XVI -- Martin E. Marty
You don't need Sightings to find cartoons in Denmark or hunting accidents in Texas, so let's turn this week to a subject too small to make the front pages, namely Roman Catholicism. It's on my mind in part because a subscriber forwarded me a critique...
February 20, 2006
Allegorize This!
Recent news stories have highlighted the fondness of contemporary Christian conservatives for allegory. The new film version of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, and its carefully targeted marketing campaign, has provoked articles in the mainstream...
February 16, 2006
Allegorize This! -- Winnifred Fallers Sullivan
Recent news stories have highlighted the fondness of contemporary Christian conservatives for allegory. The new film version of C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, and its carefully targeted marketing campaign, has provoked articles in the mainstream...
February 16, 2006
Evangelical Ecology -- Martin E. Marty
Two cheers for the evangelicals who disturbed the peace and drew headlines this week with the "Evangelical Climate Initiative." Why two and not three? I've often been told that if people outside the evangelical camp favor a faction inside it, this ca...
February 13, 2006
Religion Scholars Challenge Patriot Act -- W. Clark Gilpin
On Wednesday, January 25, the American Academy of Religion (AAR), the world's largest association of scholars of religion, joined a lawsuit that challenges a key provision of the USA Patriot Act. Citing the 2004 revocation of a travel visa for noted ...
February 9, 2006
Bonhoeffer Now -- Martin E. Marty
"Bonhoeffer Was Wrong," screams a headline in the National Catholic Reporter, atop an article by Raymond A. Schroth, S.J. (January 27). For balance, then, should we also read "Schroth Is Right"? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by Hitler and company one...