Sightings Articles
Altered States and Critical Transgressions in the Cinema -- Joshua Yumibe
The relation between religion and cinema has a complex history whose roots lie in iconoclasm, and which can be traced from the censorship debates that shaped the emerging industry in the 1900s to more recent disputes stirred by the works of Martin Sc...
September 15, 2005
Members One of Another -- Martin E. Marty
For once, a homily seems in order in Sightings. Sermons need texts; this one is from Ephesians 4:25. Type the phrase "we are members one of another" into your Internet search engine, and you'll sight 23,800 uses of the phrase -- or at least mine foun...
September 12, 2005
Debating Darwin -- Walter H. Mees, Jr.
As a Lutheran pastor nearing 60 years of age, I've had a love/hate relationship with Charles Darwin for more than 40 years. In the classrooms of my youth, more than one professor made it seem as though everyone of any intelligence knows that Darwin w...
September 8, 2005
A Saint for Labor Day -- John Rollefson
Ninety-nine years ago a brilliant young theologian published his four-hundred-page study of how scholars of the preceding century and a half had variously attempted to understand Jesus. More often than not, he found, they had discovered in their rese...
September 1, 2005
Understanding Modern Jihad -- Martin E. Marty
Today Sightings will pass over the much-sighted Pat Robertson, Cindy Sheehan, and Supreme Court issues to appraise the mind-set of jihadists. Max Rodenbeck, who covers the Middle East for the not-leftist British Economist, evaluates six new books (fo...
August 29, 2005
Riding the Saffron Wave -- Peter Gottschalk
From the recent role of conservative Christians in U.S. elections to the place of Islam in Iraq's emerging constitution, the relationship between religion and politics has become a key issue in many democracies. This is no less the case in the world'...
August 25, 2005
Thinking Inside the Mailbox -- Martin E. Marty
"Putting Jesus in Every Mailbox." That headline on a story by Shaila Dewan (New York Times, August 16) provides an opportunity for us to try to make a point about religion in public life. First, to crib from the Dewan report on the Jesus Video Projec...
August 22, 2005
Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitic? -- Alain Epp Weaver
Should anti-Zionism, as distinct from critiques of particular policies and practices of the State of Israel, be viewed as a form of anti-Semitism? Two recent statements arising from Christian-Jewish dialogue groups suggest as much: One comes from a C...
August 18, 2005
Doctors' Report -- Martin E. Marty
Follow-up research informs me that news of a survey in the July issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine could be glimpsed on cable TV and got some notice in newspapers, but it created less stir than one might have imagined. Only when I scoo...
August 15, 2005
Ave Achilles -- Christian Sheppard
Florida Marlins pitcher Dontrelle Willis—World Champion and All-Star—is a fan of Achilles. He saw Troy four times in the theater, and before each game watches highlights of Brad Pitt's performance on a DVD player in his locker. "I like the action," h...