Sightings Articles
The Comfort of the Villain -- Spencer Dew
With the death of Simon Wiesenthal on September 20, the Holocaust has slipped further into the past. As survivors pass on, memories of the event recede, and the event itself risks, as Wiesenthal warned, the threat of "trivialization." Wiesenthal's...
October 6, 2005
Schadenfreude -- Martin E. Marty
"Should I feel bad that I feel good when bad things happen to other people?" That is a paraphrase of friends' inquiries in recent weeks. "Other people" here does not refer to just "any people." If it did, feeling thus would be a big sin over which on...
October 3, 2005
Weather of Mass Destruction -- Robert McElvaine
Is God a terrorist? Many self-professed Christians seem to think so. The devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina provided a sodden, gruesome opportunity for some who call themselves Christians to vent their distortions of the religion of Jesu...
September 29, 2005
What's the Count? -- Martin E. Marty
I should know better, and even do know better, than to pass on brief comment about religious statistics. Demographers and statisticians come in many forms from many schools with many methods, and they question and correct each other and those of us w...
September 26, 2005
Death and the Compass -- Brian Britt
The July 7 bombings in London were made especially menacing by an Islamist website that claimed that the four sites of attack were designed to stamp a "burning cross" on the city. According to the Guardian, the attacks "also suggest a symbolic signif...
September 22, 2005
Control Issues -- Martin E. Marty
Twice a year, two-score Midwest historians of Christianity, more of them Roman Catholic than not, gather at the Cushwa Center at the University of Notre Dame. We celebrate and criticize one book each meeting. This time it was Catholic University of A...
September 19, 2005
Altered States and Critical Transgressions in the Cinema -- Joshua Yumibe
The relation between religion and cinema has a complex history whose roots lie in iconoclasm, and which can be traced from the censorship debates that shaped the emerging industry in the 1900s to more recent disputes stirred by the works of Martin Sc...
September 15, 2005
Members One of Another -- Martin E. Marty
For once, a homily seems in order in Sightings. Sermons need texts; this one is from Ephesians 4:25. Type the phrase "we are members one of another" into your Internet search engine, and you'll sight 23,800 uses of the phrase -- or at least mine foun...
September 12, 2005
Debating Darwin -- Walter H. Mees, Jr.
As a Lutheran pastor nearing 60 years of age, I've had a love/hate relationship with Charles Darwin for more than 40 years. In the classrooms of my youth, more than one professor made it seem as though everyone of any intelligence knows that Darwin w...
September 8, 2005
A Saint for Labor Day -- John Rollefson
Ninety-nine years ago a brilliant young theologian published his four-hundred-page study of how scholars of the preceding century and a half had variously attempted to understand Jesus. More often than not, he found, they had discovered in their rese...