Sightings Articles

Theologizing Virtual Reality
Dead chickens should not garner the attention of the United States Supreme Court. You would think not, but you'd be wrong. In 1946, United States v. Causby went before the Supreme Court. Dead chickens—and modern technology—were at the center of t...
July 25, 2019

Fyre Festival's Spiritual "Hype"
Fyre Festival was supposed to be “the cultural experience of the decade.” The brainchild of Billy McFarland, CEO of Fyre Media, Inc., and promoted by the rapper Ja Rule, Fyre Festival was sold as a “luxury music festival” to take place in Spring 2017...
April 1, 2019

Visiting a Fellow Human at the Benedictine Monastery
Nearly 15 years ago I watched a line of young men file out of a Buddhist temple near the sacred Chinese mountain of Putuo. Then, as now, I had a naive belief in the power of spiritual exercises, if not the spirits to which they are often dedicated. M...
September 7, 2017

Euthanasia, Dignity, and “Spirituality Lite”
Those (of us) who value the ethical but are not ethicists have good reason to pay attention to those philosophers, theologians, and, yes, ethicists, whose vocation it is to deal with values, whether these have to do with ordinary problems and dilemma...
July 10, 2017

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...