Sightings Articles
Midnight Mass and the Spectre of Terror
A generation has grown up under the shadow of post-9/11 preoccupation with Islam and Muslims: Midnight Mass presents something far more interesting ...
January 21, 2022
Quebec’s Ban on Religious Symbols 4.0
“People can call police if secular dress code not adhered to, Quebec Public Security Minister says.” So reads a recent headline from The Globe and Mail, one of Canada’s longest-standing national daily newspapers. Hints of a creeping police s...
April 11, 2019
Defiant Hope
Ed. Note: Today's column is the third in a three-part series by Divinity School faculty reflecting on the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand during Friday Prayer on March 15, 2019. Last Monday, Richard Rosengarten wrote about the challenges...
March 25, 2019
Manaakitanga and the Power of Silence
Ed. Note: Today's column is the second in a three-part series by Divinity School faculty reflecting on the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand last Friday. On Monday, Richard Rosengarten wrote about the challenges and possibilities of religi...
March 21, 2019
OMG
“… a longtime Facebook staffer told me that to detect instances of suicide or murder on Facebook Live the company created a system that looks for sudden spikes in attention—‘by number of people viewing, by the rate at which those impressions are go...
March 18, 2019
Save Uighur, Save China
Six Uighur sisters were each robbed of their husbands when Chinese authorities placed the men in concentration camps. They also forcefully took their children to communist-run orphanages and placed Chinese men in each of the sisters’ homes. This stor...
February 28, 2019
Catholic versus Muslim "Terrorism" in the U.S.: A Double Standard
I am a practicing, albeit far from exemplary, Roman Catholic. Like so many of my fellow Catholics, it’s impossible to overstate my sense of outrage, shame, and frustration with the leadership of the church over its unconscionable decades-long cons...
September 13, 2018
What's Ressentiment Got to Do with It
Should our republic and, with it, its kin in Western Europe survive, any and all attempts to transcend the current chaos will have to begin with, or at least include, diagnosis and analysis of what got us here. Whoever reads the internet messages, ed...
February 6, 2017
Muslims in the South
A citizen can look in any direction on almost any day and find confirmation of two observations which have informed many of us who chronicle and comment on inter-group conflicts. One is Else Frenkel-Brunswick’s comment on the ethnocentric hater: “...
October 5, 2015
Another Take on “After ‘Charlie Hebdo,’ Islam Must Critique Itself” -- Matthew Kapstein
Despite my agreement with my esteemed colleagues Professors Bruce Lincoln and Anthony Yu in most aspects of their response in last week’s Sightings to an earlier Sightings piece, “After the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Massacre: Islam Must Open Itself To Critique...