Sightings Articles
Give Me That Old-Time Atheism
Is there a new-er conversation about atheism brewing? And, if so, what might it offer religion?...
October 21, 2019
Varieties of Unbelief
Sighting “unbelief” is a never-ending task of historians of religion in the Western world. Unbelief, or at least how it’s discussed and debated among intellectuals, is episodic. I’ve been tracking debates over its many forms since the mid-1950s, and ...
March 11, 2019
Sing, Choirs of... Atheists?
Since Sightings sights theisms, it must also pay attention to alternatives to them in our pluralistic culture. These include non-, a-, anti-, counter-, para-, et cetera. One thing we’ve never written about is “sung” atheism. That changes today, becau...
June 4, 2018
Religious Children More Ungenerous?
“Crisis-talk,” including talk about religious crises, dominates media and discourse currently. Terrorism. Migration. Economies. Morality. These and others are big-screen topics, but they reflect the small accumulating evidences. Pandit Nehru obser...
November 23, 2015
Secularization in the U.S.: Overblown Or Underestimated?
Self-professed atheists are the tip of a vastly larger secular population of nonbelievers and nominal believers. In the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), with a sample size of more than 54,000, we can get representative data even o...
November 5, 2015
Religious Conservatives, "Nones," and Interfaith Dialogue
Too often, interfaith programs fail to attract broad participation and have little social impact. One major reason for this is that they tend to take place in an echo chamber of religious progressives. Local and regional interfaith associations ar...