Sightings Articles
Divorce's Toll : by Martin E. Marty
Last Wednesday the Chicago Tribune alerted readers to the release that day of an ambitious set of findings about the effects of divorce on children. Reporter Manya A. Brachear called the project "unprecedented." I crossed the street to the site of th...
January 21, 2013
Religion Beyond the Pale : by Alexander Rocklin
A July 2012 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported that 17 percent of those surveyed thought President Barack Obama was a Muslim. These were mostly conservative Republicans. Assertions that Obama is a Muslim played prominently i...
January 17, 2013
Gay Marriage Tidewater : by Martin E. Marty
David Cole captures readers' attention with the observation that "the gay rights movement has achieved more swiftly than any other individual rights movement in history, not merely the impossible but the unthinkable." A few years ago, writes Cole, "t...
January 14, 2013
Pastors Suffer Fools : by Martin E. Marty
Sightings is supposed to be about "public religion." So what are pastors, ministers, priests, rabbis doing here this week? David Brooks mentioned them Friday in his New York Times column; that is a pretty public reference to a religious theme. Let's ...
January 7, 2013
God and Newtown : by Martin E. Marty
Four daily newspapers greet the Martys at breakfast. The morning after the school killings at Newtown, Connecticut, twenty-four pages of these informed us, while zillions of twitters and tweets and television and radio programs also addressed the tra...
December 17, 2012
Reason in the Season? Rationality and the Difficulty of Religious Neutrality : by Matthew R. Petrusek
With the advent of the Holiday Season comes the annual resurgence of the religious neutrality debate. The dispute, as familiar as it is intractable, concerns the question of whether Christmas symbols—including not only mangers, swaddled babies, and p...
December 13, 2012
Measuring Religious Intensity : by Martin E. Marty
Sciences live by measurement, be it of size, temperature, numbers, or pace. So do social scientists in the world of religion. David Gibson in Religion News and the Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog featured the concept of “intensity” in a much-noted ...
December 10, 2012
Your Moment of Zen — Joy Brennan
Every episode of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show ends with a brief, unedited and un-editorialized video clip, usually extracted from the programming at a mainstream television news source. Stewart intones his final words, "Here it is, your moment of Zen...
December 6, 2012
Rob Bell's New American Christianity? — Martin E. Marty
The public media evidently cannot get enough of "The Hell-Raiser," as Rob Bell is called in the current New Yorker, or the harbinger of "A New American Christianity," as announced in the subtitle of James K. Wellman, Jr.'s robBell. Bell, of course, i...
December 3, 2012
A Legacy Buried, But Not Gone: The Importance of the Ancient Near East for Modern Religious and Political Life — Sam Boyd
Once upon a time, in a far-away land, there existed a large kingdom. The king's name was Yarim-Lim, and he was king of the Yamkhad dynasty, the capital of which, Halab, rivaled the capital of the other empires surrounding him. Yarim-Lim was a religio...