Sightings Articles
A Community Near and Far
What the failure of the European Super League can teach religious communities
May 20, 2021
How Evangelicalism is Shaping College Football
Considering Evangelicalism's role in shaping the economy of college football.
September 26, 2019
Festivals of Forgetting
Perhaps more than other years, this July in the United States has been filled with festivals. President Trump’s excessive “Salute to America” was filled with jets, armored vehicles, marches, and a Presidential speech. Many have also enjoyed the mont...
July 22, 2019
God in the Game
Stephen Versus the Game is the most recent TV series to explore the spirituality of a professional athlete—Stephen Curry—in an episode appropriately titled “Faith” (S2:E5). The thirty-minute spot on the Golden State Warriors’ sharpshooter follows a s...
June 27, 2019
Sir Roger Bannister's "Miracle" on the Track
When the recently deceased Roger Bannister began running track and studying medicine at Oxford, the four-minute mile had become known as “trackdom’s Holy Grail.” The religious allusion here was hardly accidental. Instead, it framed the magnitude of t...
March 22, 2018
Football Religion
The Monday Sightings is back, after a hiatus occasioned not by any lack of topics or scenes on which to focus but by the academic calendar at the University of Chicago, from which post we do our scanning, skimming, and probing. Surveying the places w...
September 11, 2017
Taking a Knee as Critical Civil Religion
What happens when we compare Colin Kaepernick to Tim Tebow? Here we have two professional football players “taking a knee” not for a coach’s huddle but to express personal convictions outside the boundaries of their sport. I understand how much th...
January 5, 2017
How Waiting 108 Years Makes the Good Life
For years, people have been asking me what I will do if the Chicago Cubs ever win the World Series. I don't actually know. The closest I've come to what that moment might be like was when the Cubs won the National League Division Series against the C...
October 27, 2016
Refusing to Stand: Can America's Civil Religion Tolerate Dissent?
Even people who do not follow the National Football League likely have heard of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem before games this season. "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a fl...
September 22, 2016
Oh God, Please Let My Team Win. Please. Amen.—Joseph L. Price
More than half of Americans believe that divine forces play a role in the outcome of sporting events (according to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute conducted prior to this year’s Super Bowl). American sports fans are not alone in...