Sightings Articles
AAR SBL — Martin E. Marty
Tomorrow is the end of the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) in Chicago. The Program Book for the gatherings is 496 pages long. You read that right. When I mention that "a number of thou...
November 19, 2012
McDonald's Goes Vegetarian
Last month McDonald's announced that it will be opening its first purely vegetarian restaurants in India. If you're headed to the Golden Temple in Amritsar or Vaishno Devi in Kashmir and decide you'd like to grab a burger at the local McDonald's, you...
November 1, 2012
The Swift Rise and Apparent Demise of "Jesus' Wife" — Trevor W. Thompson and David C. Kneip
On September 18, 2012, Prof. Karen L. King of Harvard Divinity School made public the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” at a conference in Rome. The text, written in Coptic (the form of Egyptian spoken in the early Christian period), is preserved on ...
October 25, 2012
Christian Bias? A Sociology Study on Gay Parents — Martin E. Marty
Sightings, at least in its Monday column releases, regularly classifies many topics dubbed "church and state" as being unsolvable. We have quoted Walter Berns who wrote that the Founding Fathers, who get so regularly invoked in contemporary debates, ...
October 22, 2012
When Rites and Rights Collide
This summer, new rulings concerning an age-old practice surfaced on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, The American Academy of Pediatrics released an updated policy statement on male circumcision. Having undertaken a systematic litera...
October 18, 2012
A Jewish Classic for Muslims -- James T. Robinson
In the past few months several news agencies have reported on a new publication of Judah Halevi's Kuzari, a classic of Jewish thought written in Judaeo-Arabic (Arabic written in Hebrew characters). Completed in 1140, the Kuzari is an apologetic def...
October 13, 2012
Religious and Secular Identity in Berlin — Brian Britt
Several recent incidents in Berlin have escalated tensions between Muslims, Jews, and the city's secular majority. Over a month ago,a rabbi wearing a kippa, or yarmulke, was beaten by four "Arab-looking" youths after being asked if he and his daughte...
October 6, 2012
"We Are All Pussy Riot" But Who Are "We?"
On February 21, the feminist collective Pussy Riot crossed the restricted threshold of the altar and began dancing and singing in front of the iconostasis of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior. They delivered approximately 30 seconds of the “pun...
September 20, 2012
On Puritans and the Whooping Cough — Philippa Koch
A whooping cough epidemic has spread in my home state of Washington. Depending on where you turn, you can read about the shamefully high number of incidences caused by the anti-vaccine movement, or, alternatively, about doctors injecting innocent c...
September 17, 2012
New York Jews — Martin E. Marty
Generalizing about American "people," which includes ethnic, racial, or class lines is chancy when one throws and observes the religious factor. Certain features of any ethnic group are so prominent that the generalizer usually does not have much at ...