Sightings Articles
A New Yorker's Reflections on 9/11/2001 -- Galen Guengerich
Remembering a Tragedy...
September 12, 2013
Moving Forward from the Folly of a Perpetual 'Walk of Faith' -- Martin E. Marty
Last week the Associated Press reported that Pastor Robert Schuller has “stage four” cancer and The New York Times reported the destruction of the “Walk of Faith” on the grounds of Schuller’s realized dream, the Crystal Cathedral. That glass edifice,...
September 9, 2013
The Holy in History: Remembering Robert Bellah (1927-2013) -- Steven Tipton
Where does religion come from, and where does it lead us? No one wrestled and played more deeply with these questions than Robert Bellah, who died unexpectedly on July 30. From Micah and Plato through Durkheim and Weber to Tillich and Talcott Parsons...
September 5, 2013
On Labor and Workers: the Silence of the Religions -- Martin E. Marty
After a month of non-labor, the Marty Center’s staff returns and publishes on Labor Day. Given the choice of dramatic, horrendous, headline-grabbing topics (e.g. Syria), to return to the scene with the topic of “Labor,” especially as in “Organized La...
September 2, 2013
Legacy of the Protestant Mainline Reconsidered : by Martin E. Marty
During Sightings’ annual “August Hiatus,” I (figuratively) load up my beach bag with books and other reading materials....
July 29, 2013
Finding God in a Song: Religion, Klezmer, and Country -- Mary Channen Caldwell
In a 2012, New York Times music-album review, “On Religion: A Search for God Through Bluegrass and Klezmer,” klezmer musician Andy Statman discusses a Christian hymn that appears on his album Old Brooklyn: “It’s about belief in God, a direct experien...
July 25, 2013
MainlineDecline, Decline-Talk, and Decline-ism -- Martin E. Marty
Published in late 1959, my first book, The New Shape of American Religion, cited several mainstream commentators and spotted numerous trends to suggest that the then-much-noticed “revival of interest” in religion had crested in 1958. It’s bad manners...
July 22, 2013
Religion in Canada: De-Christianization Continues Apace -- John Stackhouse
The 2011 Canadian census data regarding religion was recently released by Statistics Canada, the federal agency that tells us Canadians, and interested others, what to make of the decennial censuses taken by the government. The main plotline is t...
July 18, 2013
Black Churches Divided Over Same-Sex Marriage -- Martin E. Marty
Two weeks ago Sightings picked up on some lines written by the influential Evangelical-oriented author, Eric Metaxas. “Not so fast,” he wisely enough cautioned those who consider legalized, same-sex marriage to be inevitable. And yet, hours after he ...
July 15, 2013
Is Violence Antithetical to Religion?
Against the backdrop of the recently reignited and widely publicized violence in Egypt, violence that has included calls forjihadagainst President Mohamed Morsi’s opponents, I was struck by a thought-provoking article in Time (July 1, 2013) that deta...