Sightings Articles
Rights for Children -- Martin E. Marty
Two Octobers ago, former President Jimmy Carter posed a question and issued a challenge to the students and faculty of Emory University's School of Law: Could not one law school devote itself to addressing why the United States has not ratified the U...
November 17, 2005
Interfaith Excursions -- Martin E. Marty
Most sightings of religion in public life rely on print or screen. This week, let them be in person. My "interfaith" week began with friendly-to-religions humanists in an ad hoc presentation at the Chicago Humanities Festival. Next it was to Louisvil...
November 14, 2005
The Most Acceptable Prejudice -- Jon Pahl
One sad trend in the current controversy over pedophilia in the church is that it has occasioned yet another rank of people of privilege in America to represent themselves as victims. These mostly white, mostly male, mostly well-off Roman Catholic le...
November 10, 2005
Bishops and Budgets -- Martin E. Marty
Doing sightings in Friday and Saturday newspapers no longer means having to be satisfied with church ads, church bulletin notices, and the like. The Chicago Sun-Times licenses religion writer Cathleen Falsani not only to be cucumber cool and objectiv...
November 7, 2005
Buddhists on the Brain
To regular readers of mainstream news weeklies like Time and Newsweek, stories on the latest interface between Buddhism and neuroscience are familiar; every few months there is at least a brief notice on, say, a study of MRI data from Tibetan Buddhis...
November 3, 2005
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
Black Theology and Womanist Theology in Conversation
Black theology originated when African American male pastors and ecclesial administrators began reflecting on the black church's role in providing religious understandings of the major developments in America during the 1960s and '70s. Womanist theol...
October 27, 2005
Media Piety -- David Morgan
Christianity has never been shy about using visual and print media to undertake its work of evangelism, devotion, worship, and socialization of the young. From icons to mass-distributed tracts and bibles, from radio and television broadcasting to the...
October 20, 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
Poetry's Religious Turn -- Joshua Adams
Just as there is no end to the diversity of American religious practices, nor the wellspring of theories designed to analyze and define them, there is no exhausting the endurance of religion as subject matter and creative force in American poetry. Fr...