Sightings Articles
Thugs and Religion in Myanmar — Jason A. Carbine
Four months ago, Myanmar was all over the headlines. For the first time since 1988, monks and lay people had staged major protests in the streets. The self-professed Buddhist military had beaten, shot, and killed Buddhist monks. After forty-five long...
February 14, 2008
Mormons and Idiosyncrasy — Martin E. Marty
Now that Governor Romney is off the campaign trail—we don't do any Sightings of candidates on the trail—we can, without commenting on him or the part his church and faith played in his demise, do a retrospective on the Mormon-hate that blighted air w...
February 11, 2008
How to Bury a Prophet — Kathleen Flake
The Latter-day Saints buried their prophet on Saturday. Thousands attended the service in person and millions more faithful watched in chapels around the globe, as well as on the internet. What they saw was an unusually personal ceremony for a very p...
February 7, 2008
The New-Old Evangelicals — Martin E. Marty
"Anything anybody can say about Evangelicalism is true" is my take-off from Emmett Grogan's "Anything anybody can say about America is true." He and his truism issued from the sixties, a period when I would not have known about or spoken of the Prote...
February 4, 2008
American Anti-Semitism, New and Old — Sarah Imhoff
The idea of a "new anti-Semitism" has ignited scholarly controversy in the United States for almost a decade now; many sources, a Nation article among them, call it a myth, while one book's subtitle calls it "The Current Crisis." If the original kind...
January 31, 2008
Virginia and Religious Freedom — Martin E. Marty
In January of 1777 in Fredericksburg, Virginia, a committee met to revise Virginia's laws as it was becoming a state. Thomas Jefferson then and there drafted a "Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom," an antecedent to the First Amendment of the Con...
January 28, 2008
Religion in the City: Our Urban Humanity and the World Beyond — Richard A. Rosengarten
As its readers are perfectly aware, Sightings is a publication of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. These biweekly columns are one venue through which the Center aims to highlight and also to clarify our understand...
January 24, 2008
Unjust War — Martin E. Marty
A Stupid, Unjust, and Criminal War: Iraq 2001-2007 by priest, sociologist, novelist, and columnist Andrew Greeley is a collection of 121 columns dating back to 2001, in their original form. As the title suggests, the columns are not long on nuance. T...
January 21, 2008
Music in American Religious Experience — Philip V. Bohlman
Sacred music sounds the landscapes of America, and it resounds American history. It marks place and time, and in so doing it realizes the very mobility with which Americans move across time and place. Sacred music is for many Americans the sound of t...
January 17, 2008
Statistics — Martin E. Marty
Warning: This "Sightings" may induce boredom, especially among those unmoved by the reading of statistics. Maybe it will spell relief from the un-boring religion-and-politics stories of this winter. It relies upon the folks at WorldChristianDatabase....