Sightings Articles
Progressives, Evangelicals, and Presidential Politics: What Love Has, and Hasn’t, Got to Do with It
A recent analysis of the dynamics of the 2016 presidential election in Sightings—Myriam Renaud, “Progressives: To Take Back the White House, Love Your White Evangelical Neighbors”—is useful. As Ms. Renaud says, the Clinton campaign failed to replicat...
October 5, 2017
Freud and Other “God-Killers” Are Here to Stay
Darwin-Marx-Nietzsche-Freud—dubbable, and sometimes dubbed, “the four bearded god-killers”*—who framed now-classic, career-long attacks on God and gods and religion and religions, enjoy and suffer successions of varying critical fates. We will save N...
October 2, 2017
Nonwhitesome Mormons
Mormons, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, represent only about two percent of the American people, but “everybody” knows something or other about them. Ask your neighbor to discuss the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)...
September 25, 2017
Progressives: To Take Back the White House, Love Your White Evangelical Neighbors
How Progressives can improve their chances of recapturing the White House in 2020....
September 21, 2017
The Pope, the Mafia, and the Rest of Us
This past June, the Pope spoke critically of the Mafia, and did so in its heartland region in Italy. He threatened to excommunicate anyone who was part of this international crime syndicate. So here we have the unquestioned leader of the largest reli...
September 18, 2017
“It Is Music That Lifts Us Up from the Earth at the Very Moment of Death”: On the Transcendence of the Popular
Editor's Note: This essay is the final installment in our six-part series on religion and popular music. The previous issues were "The Broken Grace of Leonard Cohen" by Paul DeCamp (April 13); "Being Hip-Hop, Being Job, and Being" by Julian DeShazier...
September 14, 2017
Football Religion
The Monday Sightings is back, after a hiatus occasioned not by any lack of topics or scenes on which to focus but by the academic calendar at the University of Chicago, from which post we do our scanning, skimming, and probing. Surveying the places w...
September 11, 2017
Visiting a Fellow Human at the Benedictine Monastery
Nearly 15 years ago I watched a line of young men file out of a Buddhist temple near the sacred Chinese mountain of Putuo. Then, as now, I had a naive belief in the power of spiritual exercises, if not the spirits to which they are often dedicated. M...
September 7, 2017
Closings
Tradition compels us to close shop at Sightings for August, but we hope and intend to be back to greet September, ff., with you. However, we keep thinking of one special fact in the human condition and situation: sooner or later, every thing on earth...