Sightings Articles
Barbour — Martin E. Marty
Ian Barbour, Who Found a Balance between Faith and Science, Dies at 90. So read hisNew York Times obituary, January 12, 2014, Today's Sightings, however, is not itself an obituary of Barbour; it only draws on one. The Times headline suggests a re...
January 20, 2014
FEMEN Activist Provokes Worshippers Celebrating the Provocative Birth of God -- Heike Springhart
It should have been a festive mass in one of the centers of Germany’s Catholicism....
January 16, 2014
Guns — Martin E. Marty
Impressed and depressed by the week-long media coverage of “Bridgegate” in Governor Christie’s New Jersey, I searched for a religious angle. What is wrong with New Jersey that televangelists, pundits, and sages covering it did not religiocify or sp...
January 13, 2014
Marriage and Contraception Will Dominate 2014’s Religion Headlines — Nathan C. Walker
On the domestic front, there are two obvious frontrunners for the religion headlines likely to predominate in 2014. ...
January 9, 2014
Religious Architecture
Few expressions of religion are as public and inescapable as buildings....
January 6, 2014
"Duck Dynasty" Phil Robertson's Theology: Dead or Alive?
Since a recent GQ Magazine article outed his homophobic and pro-Jim-crow views, left-wing commentators have declared open season on Phil Robertson, the patriarch of A&E’s “Duck Dynasty.”...
January 2, 2014
Muslim Perspectives on "Remembering God" at Christmas
What Muslims think about Christmas...
December 26, 2013
Religion in 2013 -- Martin E. Marty
With this release Monday’s Sightings says good-bye to 2013. Appropriately, I want to use this moment to take a retrospective look at religion-in-the-news during the past year. The Religion Newswriters Association (RNA) was eight years old when, ...
December 23, 2013
Faith-Based Prisons: More Religion Equals Less Crime? — Brad Stoddard
The State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana, recently made headlines because it hosts an in-house seminary that offers a two-year associate degree in Pastoral Ministries and a four-year bachelor’s degree in Theology. The curriculum includes a varie...
December 19, 2013
Losing Faith — Martin E. Marty
Guiding my own thoughts about historical changes are these lines by the Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset: “Decisive historical changes do not come from great wars, terrible cataclysms, or ingenious inventions: it is enough that the heart of ...