Sightings Articles
Mary's Late Arrival to the United States by Joseph Laycock
On December 8, 2010, Our Lady of Good Help, a tiny shrine in Champion, Wisconsin, became the first Marian apparition site in the United States to receive official church approval. David L. Ricken, bishop of Green Bay, concluded a two-year investigati...
March 31, 2011
A Governor, A Cardinal, and the Death Penalty by Martin E. Marty
“On that decisive morning of March 9, [Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois] laid aside the secular factors and opened his Bible to a passage in II Corinthians about human imperfection,” Samuel G. Freedman wrote in the New York Times. “He prayed. And when ...
March 28, 2011
Disaster and the Rhetoric of Sacrifice – Yuki Miyamoto
Nearly two weeks have passed since a catastrophic earthquake and violent tsunami devastated northeastern Japan. Officials are struggling to calculate the still-mounting death toll and to assess the full scope of destruction, while efforts to avert me...
March 24, 2011
Disaster and the Rhetoric of Sacrifice by Yuki Miyamoto
Nearly two weeks have passed since a catastrophic earthquake and violent tsunami devastated northeastern Japan. Officials are struggling to calculate the still-mounting death toll and to assess the full scope of destruction, while efforts to avert me...
March 24, 2011
Jerusalem, Jerusalem by Martin E. Marty
Jerusalem, Jerusalem is not about Jerusalem the city. Guidebooks abound and histories are plentiful. What author James Carroll was moved to write is a reflection that deals with Jerusalem both as real and as metaphor. He does not exactly do justice t...
March 21, 2011
Secular Power in Swedish Schools by Joseph Ballan
Sweden, by some standards one of the world’s most secular countries, passed a new education law stipulating that public schools must teach their subjects in a “non-confessional” and “objective” manner. The law applies to all schools, including indepe...
March 17, 2011
Newt Gingrich's Comic Repentance by Martin E. Marty
After a week of tsunamis, earthquakes, Libyan horrors, Philadelphia clerical sex scandal news, National Public Radio disasters, and National Football League lock-out threats, we the people look for some comic relief. Celebrity politician Newt Gingric...
March 14, 2011
The Simple Eye: Vivian Maier's Photographic Mysticism by Jeremy Biles
Currently on display at the Chicago Cultural Center are Vivian Maier’s street photographs, which are generating enormous excitement not only in Chicago, but internationally. A self-taught photographer, Maier's work exhibits an outward-turned attitude...
March 10, 2011
Hell's Bell by Martin E. Marty
Americans may have thought that cracks in the façade and framework of evangelicalism would show up most visibly when serious evangelicals argued whether Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee would be the better presidential candidate. But now we have a chance...
March 7, 2011
The Iranian Autumn of Discontent with Religion by Ahmad Sadri
The “Arab Spring” that is blossoming in the Middle East might have been inspired by the Iranian uprising of 2009, but Iranians have not been able to emulate the Arab model. The Iranian religious autocracy possesses both the means and the will to mow ...