Sightings Articles
On Social Dissolution: Lost Threads and Forgotten Dogmas
From passing conversations on the street to extended news commentaries on air and online, it is hard to miss the pervasive sense of social breakdown....
September 23, 2021
Don't You Know There's a War On?
Thirty years after its publication, Culture Wars remains an essential guide to American politics....
September 17, 2021
Justice and the Devil in America
A controversy around the symbolisms of evil conceals the hardening of America's heart...
April 26, 2021
Raphael Warnock and the Ongoing Legacy of Black Liberation Theology
The myth of a monolithic Black theology at the heart of political scare tactics...
April 5, 2021
Imagining History without Heroes and Villains
What the Hebrew Bible can teach Americans about reckoning with the fallenness of our nation's founders...
September 14, 2020
Souls and the Guns of America
“Guns and the Soul of America” is the title of an important recent column by David Brooks (The New York Times, October 6th). Sightings writers do not claim to be experts on guns, but something or other about “souls” shows up in most of our semiweekly...
October 9, 2017
Religion in Global Affairs
When in the 1980s Scott Appleby and I were first chartered to deal with one particular public expression of religion, the complex of militant fundamentalisms, we were confronted with a global scene for which we were not prepared. We soon found out al...
May 2, 2016
Mormon Options on "Church" and "State"
“I hate war!” was a clear denunciation voiced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 14, 1936. He was talking about real war five years before he had to lead the United States in the most destructive war in history. There are lesser wars in ...
October 26, 2015
Christians Fighting Christians
Cynics, but not only cynics, like to observe, not always inaccurately, that Christians are never happy unless they are fighting—each other. Certainly, their scriptures have notes of militancy. Most of these signal fighting—evils at a distance or evil...
October 19, 2015
Culture Wars About Culture Wars
“The Next Culture War,” a New York Times op-ed (June 30) by David Brooks, set off one of the high-level debates of this summer, and will be in the news for some time to come. Brooks models a civil approach to controversy in his Friday night, on-c...