Sightings Articles
Social Media and Sin
Facebook has come under fire of late for its actions (or inaction) surrounding Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. But the problems with the social media network, and other platforms like it, run much deeper. Indeed, Sean ...
April 5, 2018
Parades, Peeps, and Paradoxes
Easter parades survive in classic Hollywood films, on the avenues near cathedrals (which paraders pass but rarely frequent), in peeps, and in song. Seldom is there a trace of connection to the religious event which prompts Easter celebrations. Eviden...
April 2, 2018
Psychoanalysis's Influence on Pope Francis
March 13, 2018, marked five years of both Pope Francis’s pontificate and commentary upon it, with little signs of either flagging. In fact, scattered moments from the past few years indicate a still-underappreciated psychoanalytic influence on thi...
March 29, 2018
Networks and Public Religion
Sightings should perhaps be called “Listenings” this week, as the idea for this column came to me as I listened to a variety of speakers and conversed with other listeners present at a historians’ conference at the University of Notre Dame on “Enduri...
March 26, 2018
Sir Roger Bannister's "Miracle" on the Track
When the recently deceased Roger Bannister began running track and studying medicine at Oxford, the four-minute mile had become known as “trackdom’s Holy Grail.” The religious allusion here was hardly accidental. Instead, it framed the magnitude of t...
March 22, 2018
Protesting Children
“How Young Is Too Young for Protest?”—an article by Stephanie Saul and Anemona Hartocollis in the New York Times published the day before the March 14 protest marches against gun violence in a great number of American high schools—posed questions whi...
March 19, 2018
Treating the Divine in Science Fiction
Editor's Note: This is the fourth and final installment in our series on religion and science fiction. Be sure to read the three previous issues in this series: Audrey Thompson's "'Cross'-examining the Biblical Witness in War for the Planet of the Ap...
March 15, 2018
Down and Out in Catholic Ireland
I used to teach with or alongside Emmet Larkin, University of Chicago expert on the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, motivated in part to understand Chicago Catholicism, which still numbers a couple hundred thousand people. Larkin wrote much and tut...
March 12, 2018
Cornel West and the Principle of Hope
It is worth taking the time to listen to W. E. B. Du Bois’s words from his own mouth. There are dozens of examples on the web of Du Bois addressing the Negro problem, breaking down his Marxist analysis of slavocracy, or advocating for the unity of po...
March 8, 2018
Chaos
Three Hebrew words—tohu we bohu—show up in the second verse of Genesis, describing the moments or aeons during which “the earth was without form, and void.” God, it is announced, took care of that scene by creating light and all that followed. But th...