Sightings Articles
Evangelical Identity Crises
The champion among contenders for a “crisis” of experience and identity these years is American evangelicalism, which was born from the crises of the eighteenth century, and has been part of the Protestant package ever since. Polls, the press, and fo...
February 19, 2018
In Search of a Rectification of Names
After eighty years, the college fellowship that I attended as an undergraduate at Princeton has altered its name. “Princeton Evangelical Fellowship” is gone, replaced by “Princeton Christian Fellowship.” I was not surprised or annoyed. The original t...
October 26, 2017
In Defense of the Liberal in the Study of Religion
Editor's note: In observance of the holidays, Sightings will be off next week. We wish to thank all those who have contributed, read, shared, and responded to our columns this past year. See you in 2017! In the aftermath of the U.S. president...
December 22, 2016
InterVarsity Blues
The world of Evangelical higher education keeps making news. Wheaton College in Illinois recently dealt with a flap over a faculty member’s theological comments about Christianity and Islam. She is no longer at Wheaton. And last week, the InterVarsit...
October 17, 2016
The Berned-Over District
Writing from Rochester, NY, a week ahead of the recent New York Democratic Presidential primary, D. D. Guttenplan likened the fervor surrounding Bernie Sanders’s political moment to the Protestant religious revivals that consumed that same region in ...
May 5, 2016
Pope Francis
Depressed, weary, or frightened by stories of USIS and ISIS and other horrors, plus by debates over “religious extremism” and the role of Islam, we focus instead on the not-unimportant figure of Pope Francis, who makes news and inspires reflection. W...