Sightings Articles
Catholic versus Muslim "Terrorism" in the U.S.: A Double Standard
A double standard...
September 13, 2018
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
Infallibility and Heresy
Not since certain American Protestants were publicly anti-Catholic, as older readers may remember them having been, have we read as many headlines with words like “infallibility,” “heresy,” papal “plots,” “schism,” etc., as we do these days. My late ...
December 5, 2016
Reformation Jostlings
On this day, 499 years ago, a friar proposed 95 theses for debate and “posted” them (in today’s world and words), meaning he mailed them to his superior, the Archbishop of Mainz, and/or nailed them to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Wh...
October 31, 2016
Justification
Last week, while the sports-loving public watched timed Olympic events, viewers relearned the values of timing, measuring, and scorekeeping. Some races were decided by 1/100th of a second margins. The substantially smaller, microscopically observable...