Sightings Articles
Sacred Sites Violated
What if the Sioux Nation decided to build a pipeline through Arlington Cemetery? This question from Faith Spotted Eagle—who lacks a Ph.D. in comparative religion and who would never be employed to teach the phenomenology of burial ritual—got at the h...
February 13, 2017
Rock, Paper, Scissors
With each passing day since the inauguration of Donald Trump the news cycle gets more punishing. Power is consolidated within the executive branch. The three-headed monster of authoritarianism, fear mongering and intimidation takes another step on it...
February 9, 2017
What's Ressentiment Got to Do with It
Should our republic and, with it, its kin in Western Europe survive, any and all attempts to transcend the current chaos will have to begin with, or at least include, diagnosis and analysis of what got us here. Whoever reads the internet messages, ed...
February 6, 2017
The Acquittal of "Patient Zero"
In the midst of the tumultuous vitriol of the recent election and its aftermath, it was unfortunate that a significant story regarding a once virulent legend of the AIDS epidemic went relatively unnoticed—a story that returns us to the apogee of the ...
February 2, 2017
Religious Art Discovered Alive!
No “-scope,” either “micro-“ or “tele-,” was needed last week for us to sight an article written “as if” for Sightings, so bold was its headline, so appropriate to be appropriated by this column on “religion in public life,” given our focus on art an...
January 30, 2017
Acknowledging the Good Stuff
Obituaries are seldom a time for irony, even when the subject is known to be religious. Recent obituaries for Sister Susan Moran of Toronto, who died on December 18th, 2016, warranted a full page in Canada’s national newspaper The Globe and Mail (...
January 26, 2017
Carrying On or The Little Man Who Wasn't There
Sightings looks for meaning in the abyss of chaos that currently challenges American, and global, culture. The experience of life in its shadows led me to remember “Antigonish,” an old poem (1899) by Hughes Mearns. Some readers may welcome an audio b...
January 23, 2017
Myths Debunked: Why Did White Evangelical Christians Vote for Trump?
What motivated white evangelicals to vote for Trump in 2016: Abortion and supreme-court nominees? No. Terrorism, the economy, and immigration....
January 19, 2017
Furies over Immigration
When writing for Sightings I can look down from our residence window on two cathedral towers. A century ago, in the years after the Chicago Fire of 1871, those towers towered over a rebuilt cityscape, still of low-rise buildings. Cathedrals dominated...
January 16, 2017
Dylann Roof, the Radicalization of the Alt-Right, and Ritualized Racial Violence
Ritualized racial violence...