Sightings Articles
Economics by Martin E. Marty
Virtually every church newsletter, denominational web-site, religious periodical, or other medium, disseminated in print or electronically, makes some reference to the economic situation in which all classes of Americans find themselves today. Local ...
March 16, 2009
The Religious Violence of "Defending Marriage" by Jon Pahl
A recent article in The Atlantic and recently released Lutheran documents give good reasons to revisit the status of gays and lesbians across American society. Unfortunately, few commentators to date have addressed the most troubling development of ...
March 12, 2009
Mainline Clergy by Martin E. Marty
While the number of Americans coded as "Mainline Protestant" has gone down (almost) twenty percent in (almost) fifty years, still (almost) one in five Americans and (almost) one in four voters are part of this often (almost) invisible cohort which re...
March 9, 2009
Slumdog Courage: What is Written? by Alison Downie
Note: This Sightings contains spoilers. Just as the unlikely Jamal Malik won twenty million rupees, his very "foreign" (and therefore unlikely) movie recently took home an armful of Oscars. Both the events of Slumdog Millionaire and the eve...
March 5, 2009
Evangelicals and the Environment by Martin E. Marty
This one needs an introduction: Years ago at scholarly evangelical gatherings I would be introduced as "this year's non-evangelical speaker", to which I'd respond with a reminder, "I'm the only person in this room who even belongs to a church body n...
March 2, 2009
The Hidden Dialogue by Thomas Zebrowski
The public debate about God in which the writings of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Dinesh D'Souza, among others, are prominent is more obviously focused on the existence than the nature of the divine. Yet the second topic is very releva...
February 26, 2009
Commodification by Martin E. Marty
The Pope (John Paul II) was right. The World Council of Churches was right. The preacher down the block was right. The "moderate evangelicals" were right. The first had a perfect record against collectivization; the second had a mixed record, but...
February 23, 2009
Hyper-Muscular Christianity by Joseph Laycock
In Seattle, self-described "charismatic Calvinist" Mark Driscoll preaches that "Jesus is a pride fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand, and the willingness to make someone bleed. That is a guy I can worship...I cannot worship a guy...
February 19, 2009
Interreligion by Martin E. Marty
"Brotherhood Week": Is there still such an observance? I Googled, and came up with scores of versions, sung and printed, of Tom Lehrer's delightfully cynical or cynically delightful song of satire about the prejudices and hatreds that were disguise...
February 16, 2009
Valentine's Day in India
The Sunday Times of India invited me to write something about Hindu attitudes to women for the February 8, 2009, issue, prompted both by the annual problem caused by Valentine's Day in India and by the more specific incident of violence against women...