Sightings Articles
Mapping Religious Trends -- Martin E. Marty
The United States Census has not collected religious data since 1936. Some religious groups do not want to be numbered or to release numbers, so counting or not became a religious issue. The same census, however, reveals much about trends tha...
January 8, 2001
Grasping at Symbols -- R. Jonathan Moore
The "Great Dissenter" Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote that, in America, "we live by symbols." These words came to mind as I scanned a cluster of recent church-state stories. In Kentucky, a familiar battle continues over posting the Ten Commandmen...
December 14, 2000
Why Silence about the Campaign? -- Martin E. Marty
Having barely mentioned here this year's presidential campaign, an explanation is in order. In part, the neglect is personal. I love politics but, for example, I've not "done" presidential politics in forty-plus years of weekly comment in *The Chr...
December 11, 2000
Charlie Ward and Religious Ignorance by R. Jonathan Moore
It's been well over a week since a New York Times Magazine article by Eric Konigsberg portrayed Knicks point guard Charlie Ward as a crypto-anti-Semite. By now the story's details are probably familiar. To research his story, the author often...
December 4, 2000
Is There a Religious Vote? -- Martin E. Marty
*Sightings* has chosen to keep blinders on concerning the overdone, overcovered, overtreated presidential election campaign, full of religious nuances and blatancies though it be. But as Auction Day -- a.k.a. Election Day -- nears, it is time to be r...
October 30, 2000
Spiritual Adultery? -- Martin E. Marty
Excommunication is very rare in American religious bodies. Can you think of an instance in which a lay person was ever excluded from membership? Yet the deputy managing editor of *World*, a representative magazine for conservative evangelicals, urges...
October 26, 2000
A Holy War for Human Rights -- Scott Appleby
Graphic and deeply disturbing images of violence, motivated in part by religious animosities, emanated from the Middle East last week. Such images, whether beamed from Israel, Palestine, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Northern Ireland, or the Unite...
October 19, 2000
Declining Catechesis -- Martin E. Marty
How does secularization occur? What speeds up the process? Instead of pointing to some massive secular humanist conspiracy as the major cause, many social thinkers urge us to watch the subtle improvisations made by individuals and publics. *Sighti...
October 16, 2000
America's Mythical Religious Past
On the first day of the course I teach on "Religion in Colonial America" at the University of Chicago Divinity School, I often ask students to tell me what they already know about early American religious history. Since many of them are new to the fi...
October 12, 2000
Wealth and Spirituality -- Martin E. Marty
We do our sightings in all kinds of corners of American life. Anyone who stays in a hotel receives, willy-nilly, *USA Today*. Whoever receives *USA Today* will find little colored graphs in the lower left-hand corner of a section page. Recently one d...