Sightings Articles
The Metaphysical Moment
Citings of Sightings, in which we sometimes indulge, can be signs of narcissism, impoverished imagination, or a lack of research in quest of fresh things to say. But sometimes quotations of earlier columns—now archived, lost in cyberspace, or almost ...
January 9, 2017
Taking a Knee as Critical Civil Religion
What happens when we compare Colin Kaepernick to Tim Tebow? Here we have two professional football players “taking a knee” not for a coach’s huddle but to express personal convictions outside the boundaries of their sport. I understand how much th...
January 5, 2017
Many Sightings of Hope
For more than a year I engaged in the visual and oral analog to “fasting.” Fasters discipline themselves not to eat. I chose not to comment on the election campaigns. A digital word-search will find no mention in 50 Monday Sightings of any presidenti...
January 2, 2017
In Defense of the Liberal in the Study of Religion
Editor's note: In observance of the holidays, Sightings will be off next week. We wish to thank all those who have contributed, read, shared, and responded to our columns this past year. See you in 2017! In the aftermath of the U.S. president...
December 22, 2016
Suicide among Priests?
“Suicide is on the rise among Irish priests” is the kind of report which causes or should cause concern and a sense of crisis among Irish and non-Irish, priests and non-priests, Catholics and non-Catholics—anyone with humane instincts, empathic conce...
December 19, 2016
"We Don't Have Enough Proof": Pizzagate as Epistemological Panic
A man with a rifle enters a pizza place, not for the purposes of mass murder or terrorism but on a quest for epistemological certainty. Twenty-eight-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch had heard a theory, and he wanted to know if it was true. He had encoun...
December 15, 2016
The Religiocification of Hate
Sightings was born as an endeavor to discover and comment on the traces of “religion” which supposedly survive in a “secular” society. However, instead of sighting only such presumed distant, obscure, or minuscule traces, our authors have often had t...
December 12, 2016
The Figure of the Spiv
On October 20th, the House of Commons of the United Kingdom voted to strip Sir Philip Green of his knighthood. The vote is not binding, as the Honours Forfeiture Committee has final say in these matters, but the debate regarding the motion was an occ...
December 8, 2016
Infallibility and Heresy
Not since certain American Protestants were publicly anti-Catholic, as older readers may remember them having been, have we read as many headlines with words like “infallibility,” “heresy,” papal “plots,” “schism,” etc., as we do these days. My late ...
December 5, 2016
CCCU Tries to Thread the Needle
Issues of human sexuality continue to challenge evangelical Christian higher education organizations. As Martin E. Marty discussed in the October 17, 2016, issue of Sightings, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship recently announced a new policy to let g...