Sightings Articles
Questions in a Nuclear Age
Editor’s Note: Sightings will be on “holiday hiatus” until Thursday, January 4. We would like to thank our readers and contributors for their continued support and engagement this past year, and we look forward to bringing you more of the very best c...
December 21, 2017
Charities Feel Christmas Fear
“Charities Fear Tax Bill Will Cut Giving” is the kind of headline leaders of churches and charities hate to read about trends that they don’t like to face, as face they must. The subhead in a story reflecting on the current tax bill in The New York T...
December 18, 2017
Jerusalem
With the outset of autumn as determined by the Jewish liturgical calendar, a daily prayer is recited beseeching God to bless the Holy Land with rain: “… Turn to us, God, who are surrounded by troubles like water. / For the Jewish people’s sake, do no...
December 14, 2017
The Hearts of Millennials
As longtime readers of Sightings will know, a quotation from José Ortega y Gasset about “decisive historical changes” has been decisive for my own work as an historian. I’ll cite it today both as an introduction to this week’s “sighting” of millennia...
December 11, 2017
Historical Justice in an Era of #MeToo: Legacies of John Howard Yoder
Defanging the beast....
December 7, 2017
The Relevance of Religious Studies
No doubt many members of every profession and every professional (and academic) organization find occasions to speak up and protest the failure by people in strategic positions—in government, media, and the like—to be aware of the resources such orga...
December 4, 2017
Chicago: Religion and the State of Our City
February 2018 will mark the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. ...
November 30, 2017
Did the Anabaptist Reformers “Win”?
Editor's Note: Those in the Chicago area are invited to join the Divinity School today at 4:30 pm in Swift Hall's third-floor lecture room for "Just Reaction: Religion, Ethics, and the Nuclear Age," part of a series of events reflecting on the 75th a...
November 27, 2017
Calvinism II
Editor’s Note: Sightings will be off this Thursday, November 23rd, for the Thanksgiving holiday. Guilt, Luthero-Calvinist style, could be blamed for this column, except that this forgiven Luthero-Calvinist sinner, when writing, favors pardon a...
November 20, 2017
Luther’s Imagined Ethiopia and the Challenges of Global Exchange
The thesis of David Daniels’s recent Sightings column, “Martin Luther and Ethiopian Christianity: Historical Traces,” is exciting and important amidst the recent celebrations of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. In short, the Reformation was not “a solely...