Sightings Articles
Classroom Controversy by Martin E. Marty
Anyone who spends over a half century at the center and the margins of higher academe, as I have, knows better than to get involved with tenure disputes or hirings and firings of faculty. The further away from the scene of conflict one is, the dimme...
July 26, 2010
The Bricolage Religion of LOST and American Religious Culture by Benjamin E. Zeller
This spring the television series LOST, which achieved cult status over its six seasons, came to an end. A tale of the survivors of an airplane crash on a mysterious tropical island, the series wove together stories of the survivors’ pasts and prese...
July 22, 2010
Jesus and America by Martin E. Marty
“If you would like to know Jesus as Lord and Savior, Call Need Him Ministry.” That invitation appears at the bottom of a full-page Hobby Lobby ad that ran in scores, if not hundreds, of newspapers a fortnight ago, appropriately on the Fourth of July...
July 19, 2010
American Idolatry: The King James Version by Cooper Harriss
Americans have “a thing” for the Decalogue, displaying it publicly – wherever a court injunction for its removal might be evaded – alongside American flags and presidential portraits. Early in these ten commandments, we learn that YHWH forbids idola...
July 15, 2010
Reporting on the God Gap by Martin E. Marty
“A New Roadmap for Reaching Religious Americans on Public Policy Issues” is the subtitle for Beyond the God Gap, a 49-page report and chart for those who are trying to find their way among religious groups as they show up in politics and culture. Th...
July 12, 2010
Modern Exorcism: Trading Autonomy for Demonology by Joseph Laycock
Last month, a feature in the online magazine Details told the story of Kevin Robinson, a gay teenager from Connecticut. Brought up in a Pentecostal household, Kevin first came out to his family when he was sixteen. His mother, refusing to accept ho...
July 8, 2010
Christianity Going South by Martin E. Marty
Sightings authors often comment on religion in the United States rather than "the rest of the world," but through the years have shown regularly how artificial or at least permeable such geographical distinctions are when it comes to religion. Phili...
July 5, 2010
Lightning Strikes and Divine Disfavor by Adam Darlage
As mentioned in last week’s Sightings, until recently drivers on the stretch of I-75 between Cincinnati and Dayton had the opportunity to contemplate the six-story (62 ft.) Jesus statue at the Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Ohio, on the northbound side...
July 1, 2010
Extinction by Martin E. Marty
The blue sky above and the blue lake below my window helped inspire hopes on a weekend morning for a beautiful, untroubled summer day. Then a jostling alert and a son’s apocalyptic posting linked me to an MSNBC item headed by the question, “Will hum...
June 27, 2010
Fire and Fraud: Touchdown Jesus Meets the Cult of Pain by Jeremy Biles
I recalled C. G. Jung’s definition of “synchronicity” last week when two email messages, each containing a link to a religion news story, arrived to my inbox almost simultaneously. Synchronicity refers to “temporally coincident occurrences of acausa...