Sightings Articles
Why White Evangelicals Stuck with Trump
What polling data tells us about why White Evangelical support for Trump was undiminished in the 2020 election
February 11, 2021
Rachel Held Evans, Gone and Soon Forgotten?
Christian feminist author Rachel Held Evans inspired fervent love (and fervent opposition) in her decade of public wrestling with faith. Her shocking death at age 37 prompted those who loved her to gather in the place where most of them met her, the...
May 16, 2019
Faking the Bible
News outlets widely reported last week that five Dead Sea Scroll fragments acquired and displayed by the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, are forgeries. For Dead Sea Scrolls experts, this announcement came as no surprise: a number had already r...
October 29, 2018
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
CCCU Tries to Thread the Needle
Issues of human sexuality continue to challenge evangelical Christian higher education organizations. As Martin E. Marty discussed in the October 17, 2016, issue of Sightings, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship recently announced a new policy to let g...
December 1, 2016
Conversations about Hard Truths
David Gushee celebrated July 4th with a much-discussed piece in his “Christians, Conflict & Change” column on the so-frequently helpful Religion News Service. This week Sightings uses Gushee as a single source and relies on Wikipedia as a terse i...
July 11, 2016
Football
The jumbotron at Soldier Field, visible from our condo window, offers a colorful set of images on Sundays when the Chicago Bears are at home. It displays more liturgical colors than can the devotees of other religions still trying to attract worshipp...
November 9, 2015
Ashley Madison
Back from the annual hiatus or sabbatical or goof-off time when Sightings wasn’t sighting religion-and-public life, we confront enormous backlogs on-line and printouts on-file: so much has happened. Let’s single out a much-noticed topic: “the Ashley ...
September 7, 2015
Papal Tribunal
Almost a year ago Sightings explained to readers why this column had devoted so little attention to one of the dramatic religious stories of our time: the abuse of children by Roman Catholic celibate males. First, news of this abuse received so mu...
June 15, 2015
Evangelicals, LGBTQ+, and the Bible: What's (Been) Going On?
In early March, evangelical Pastor Stan Mitchell announced to his congregation, GracePoint Church in Nashville, that he fully affirmed gay members. Growing numbers of evangelical pastors in the United States are coming out in favor of full accepta...