Sightings Articles
Faith, Grace, and the Arts -- Martin E. Marty
Devoted to "public religion" or "religion-in-public," Sightings surveys public arenas that are not confined to the political world. Education, commerce, entertainment and the arts represent spheres where publics encounter religion. The arts, whi...
May 6, 2013
The Argument about Holocaust Studies -- Martin E. Marty
One of the most heated public controversies over a religious theme in America has to do with Holocaust studies. And none has been more heated and more public than that between Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior editor of COMMENTARY (published by the Americ...
May 4, 2013
The Fiction of Evangelical Friction -- Noah Toly
An April 13, 2013, New York Times article by Julia Preston reports a shift of opinions on immigration policy among evangelical Protestants in the United States. In her article, Preston suggests that there is a division between “Evangelical leaders” ...
May 2, 2013
The Infidel and the Indifferent -- Martin E. Marty
Fifty-two years ago—can it be?—I published The Infidel: Freethought and American Religion, and have been tracking “the infidel” ever since. Whether he or she was dubbed “free-thinker,” “agnostic,’ “atheist,” “secularist” or many things more, the infi...
April 29, 2013
The Pope and the Poor -- Joshua Connor
In an article that appeared in The Guardian a few days after the March 13, 2013, election of Francis, the first Pope from South America, the British environmental activist, George Monbiot, railed against depictions of the new Pope as a defender of th...
April 25, 2013
Confidence in Religion Drops — Martin E. Marty
Three “War College” scholars, in the Spring 2013 issue of Daedalus (see reference), discuss some of the reasons why the military wins more confidence than other American institutions. The military is not our subject; those authors may be biased becau...
April 22, 2013
Marshall Sahlins' Latest Stand — Kelly E. Hayes
In late February 2013, University of Chicago professor emeritus Marshall Sahlins formally resigned from the National Academy of Science (NAS) in protest over that body’s election of Napolean Chagnon as a member and its sponsoring of research to impro...
April 18, 2013
Evangelicals Change and Make Changes — Martin E. Marty
The familiar “Protestant-Catholic-Jew” mantra no longer defines American religion. Politicians, bloggers, statisticians, and demographers now conventionally add “Evangelical” to the classifying. When Will Herberg wrote the canonical book Protestant-C...
April 15, 2013
Bid for State Religion Fails — Nathan C. Walker
According to a lawsuit filed last month by the American Civil Liberties Union, the commissioners of North Carolina’s Rowan County have, over the past five years, opened 97 percent of County Board meetings with explicitly Christian prayers. Professor ...
April 11, 2013
Seminaries and the Future — Martin E. Marty
News of theological seminaries does not usually appear in public media unless someone who is part of one of them creates scandal—sexual or financial, since even heresy rarely gets covered in contemporary America—and cannot go unnoticed and not-covere...