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
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
Of Islam and the Public Square: The Role of the Classroom
An opinion poll showing 31% of Americans feel safer because of the travel ban placed on seven Muslim-majority countries (since reduced to six)—with another 41% expressing no particular opinion—is reflective of the obscure, if not fearsome, image of I...
March 16, 2017
The Religiocification of Hate
Sightings was born as an endeavor to discover and comment on the traces of “religion” which supposedly survive in a “secular” society. However, instead of sighting only such presumed distant, obscure, or minuscule traces, our authors have often had t...
December 12, 2016
A Crisis of Faith in Laïcité
A few weeks ago in late August, a woman was napping on a crowded beach in Nice when a group of police officers approached and ordered her to remove her shirt. In a striking sequence of photos, a photographer for AFP captured the scene (see Gillman, e...
September 15, 2016
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: “...