Sightings Articles

The Great American Slumber?
Are we experiencing the opposite of a “Great Awakening” in the U.S. today?...
November 25, 2019

Getting Religion
“Getting Religion” is a concept born of H. L. Mencken’s observation that in the free market of American religion, citizens “get religion” when they convert or get steamed up. They do so in different ways and with different degrees of fever. Kenneth L...
September 19, 2016

Post-Religious, Post-Spirituality Seekers
The New Year bids us do some sighting of the New in the worlds of post-modern, post-religious, post hippie, post “spirituality” sub-cultures. We can gain access to much of this by keeping an eye on HarperElixir, a promised book-line from HarperOne, t...
January 4, 2016

Secularization in the U.S.: Overblown Or Underestimated?
Self-professed atheists are the tip of a vastly larger secular population of nonbelievers and nominal believers. In the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), with a sample size of more than 54,000, we can get representative data even o...
November 5, 2015

Religious Conservatives, "Nones," and Interfaith Dialogue
Too often, interfaith programs fail to attract broad participation and have little social impact. One major reason for this is that they tend to take place in an echo chamber of religious progressives. Local and regional interfaith associations ar...