Sightings Articles
Wallstreet by Martin E. Marty
This week's collage of Wall Street Journal headlines, none of them explicitly but all of them implicitly evoking "public religion" themes, is broken up by passages from the King James Version of the Bible, and from me - my attempts to see if we can f...
February 9, 2009
Updike's Motions of Grace
John Updike, who died last week at 76, has found valediction in the interim as a literary giant-a novelist and short story writer, a poet, and a critic. Chicago Tribune culture writer Julia Keller places him in a foursome with Norman Mailer, Phillip...
February 5, 2009
Pope Benedict and the Jews — Martin E. Marty
On January 22, responding to a post-speech questioner at St. Scholastica College in Duluth, which is (roughly) twenty-four percent Catholic and sixteen percent Lutheran, I observed that American Catholic criticisms of Pope Benedict XVI have often bee...
February 2, 2009
Showers of Blood: The Cosmology of Charles Fort — P. Genesius Durica
In December 2008 scientists working in France announced the discovery of sugar molecules in the far reaches of the Milky Way. Soon to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, these findings increase the odds that life exists on other planets. ...
January 29, 2009
Inaugural Jesus — Martin E. Marty
The apostle Paul claimed that Jesus, in the form of "Christ crucified," was "a stumbling block [skandalon=scandal=offence] to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles." (I Corinthians 1:23) Jews+Gentiles=pretty much everybody. You may ask, "What is Jesus d...
January 26, 2009
An Inner Life With New Meaning
As the indicators by which we've measured our collective well-being in recent years continue to plummet, I found a conversation with Parker Palmer echoing in my head. He and I spoke years ago on the radio program Speaking of Faith about his mid-life...
January 22, 2009
Farewell, President — Martin E. Marty
Tomorrow, they tell us, is an epochal day in America and on the world-scene, so we'll choose to be reflective about some of its meanings. The dictionary says that sighting is "the act of catching sight of something, especially something unusual or...
January 19, 2009
Religious Suicide In An Investor's World — Rita Polevoy
As the New Year begins, many are haunted by losses suffered from the ongoing economic crisis. Amongst the biggest losers sits Bernard Madoff, mastermind of a fifty billion dollar Ponzi scheme that stole from those who invested with him, including mu...
January 15, 2009
Sex and Seminaries — Martin E. Marty
Did you know that there is a Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing? Last Thursday, January 8, the Institute, together with Union Theological Seminary in New York, issued a fifty-two page report, which is a call for North Americ...
January 12, 2009
News from the Religion and Science Front — Douglas Anderson
In the scientific community, there has been a significant increase in "sightings" of articles and studies on the "science" of religion. Various points of view, and occasionally overt agendas, emerge from the research. If a Templeton-like foundation ...