Sightings Articles
Catholic Schools Tomorrow
“The then-U.S. Office of Education wrote in a 1903 report that the system of Catholic free parochial schools was the most impressive religious fact in the country at that time.” I sighted this quote in a review of Parish School: A History of American...
February 11, 2019
Catholic Identity: A Balancing Act?
Early in my writing career I set out to describe a certain posture or pose, and chose—pretentiously, I admit—to speak of an “equilibristic stance.” The article which included this ungainly phrase was then translated into German, where it appeared, au...
June 24, 2018
Our Latino Neighbors
Who is my neighbor? That question is asked of Jesus in the Gospels. “Neighbor” can mean someone who lives nearby, and this question about physical proximities and distances gets answered first by demographers. Television in our city, Chicago, once up...
April 23, 2018
Papal Polarities
“Will Pope Francis Cause a Schism in the Catholic Church?” That headline in The New Yorker (April 16) is subheaded: “In his new book, ‘To Change the Church,’ the Times columnist Ross Douthat critiques the Pontiff.” Such an opener requires some backgr...
April 16, 2018
Down and Out in Catholic Ireland
I used to teach with or alongside Emmet Larkin, University of Chicago expert on the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, motivated in part to understand Chicago Catholicism, which still numbers a couple hundred thousand people. Larkin wrote much and tut...
March 12, 2018
The Pope, the Mafia, and the Rest of Us
This past June, the Pope spoke critically of the Mafia, and did so in its heartland region in Italy. He threatened to excommunicate anyone who was part of this international crime syndicate. So here we have the unquestioned leader of the largest reli...
September 18, 2017
The Necessity of Bridge-Building
David Levithan, author of Boy Meets Boy (2003) and Two Boys Kissing (2013), will be awarded with the 2017 Chicago Tribune Young Adult Literary Prize at next weekend’s Printer’s Row Lit Fest in Chicago. Many of the bestselling author’s books feature g...
June 5, 2017
The Church Militant
Headlines in the Detroit Free Press, which reached us recently via USA Today, and the Chicago Sun-Times, from the second-to-last day of last year, were wake-up alarms alerting readers to yet another extremist group of the sort that prospers in these ...
February 27, 2017
Furies over Immigration
When writing for Sightings I can look down from our residence window on two cathedral towers. A century ago, in the years after the Chicago Fire of 1871, those towers towered over a rebuilt cityscape, still of low-rise buildings. Cathedrals dominated...