Sightings Articles
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...
October 13, 2005
Marathon Day -- Martin E. Marty
Yesterday, 40,000 atheists, agnostics, Muslims, Jews, and secularists gathered on the lakefront in our city for a sacred tribal rite. And seventy-four days from now, thousands will gather at a huge theater near the lakeshore to celebrate another rite...
October 10, 2005
The Comfort of the Villain -- Spencer Dew
With the death of Simon Wiesenthal on September 20, the Holocaust has slipped further into the past. As survivors pass on, memories of the event recede, and the event itself risks, as Wiesenthal warned, the threat of "trivialization." Wiesenthal's...
October 6, 2005
Schadenfreude -- Martin E. Marty
"Should I feel bad that I feel good when bad things happen to other people?" That is a paraphrase of friends' inquiries in recent weeks. "Other people" here does not refer to just "any people." If it did, feeling thus would be a big sin over which on...
October 3, 2005
Weather of Mass Destruction -- Robert McElvaine
Is God a terrorist? Many self-professed Christians seem to think so. The devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina provided a sodden, gruesome opportunity for some who call themselves Christians to vent their distortions of the religion of Jesu...
September 29, 2005
What's the Count? -- Martin E. Marty
I should know better, and even do know better, than to pass on brief comment about religious statistics. Demographers and statisticians come in many forms from many schools with many methods, and they question and correct each other and those of us w...
September 26, 2005
Death and the Compass -- Brian Britt
The July 7 bombings in London were made especially menacing by an Islamist website that claimed that the four sites of attack were designed to stamp a "burning cross" on the city. According to the Guardian, the attacks "also suggest a symbolic signif...
September 22, 2005
Control Issues -- Martin E. Marty
Twice a year, two-score Midwest historians of Christianity, more of them Roman Catholic than not, gather at the Cushwa Center at the University of Notre Dame. We celebrate and criticize one book each meeting. This time it was Catholic University of A...