Dear Readers,
 
Per tradition, Sightings will be closing up shop for the month of August—a chance for us to gear up for another year of insightful reporting and expert commentary on the place of religion in current events and public life. Not wanting to leave you without something to read during our annual summer break, however, we’ve compiled some of the very best and most-read columns from 2020 thus far. We hope you enjoy this curated collection of religion “sightings” from the past seven months. 
 
Religion and the Pandemic

• The Coronavirus and Us | by Richard A. Rosengarten
• Faith in the Time of Coronavirus: The Power of Spacial Solidarity | by Cynthia G. Lindner
• Pan-Nemesis: COVID-19 and Beyond | by William Schweiker
• Measuring the Apocalypse | by Evan F. Kuehn
• Love, Obligation, and Possibilities in the Time of COVID-19 | by Stephanie Friedman      
• Patience in the Pandemic | by Lijia Xie
• The Strange War on COVID-19 | by Russell P. Johnson
• Hope in the Midst of Apocalypse | by Martin E. Marty
• Pandemic Preaching | by Cynthia G. Lindner
• We Need Fewer Heroes | by Russell P. Johnson
• Commencement 2020: Let the Adulting Begin | Cynthia G. Lindner         
• Time in Coronatide | by Sean Hannan
• COVID-19 and the Limits of Utilitarianism | by Nicholas Buck
• Jobs for All? | by Steven Tipton & Brooks Holifield
• Halting the Hajj | by David J. Wasserstein
• A Normalized Sense of Hopelessness | by Cynthia G. Lindner

Religion and American Culture

• Disruptive Religion | by Cynthia G. Lindner
• Sunday Is ... | by Martin E. Marty
• Memory Full: Boomers and the Art of Never Going Away | by David Gottlieb
• Sighting (and Citing) Chaplains | by Cynthia G. Lindner
• The Daybells and Latter-day Saint Apocalypticism | by Christopher James Blythe
• Thank God, Churches are Dying... and Living | by Martin E. Marty

Religion in Film, Literature, and Art

• By the Grace of ... God? | by Jack Nuelle
• American Graphic | by Richard A. Rosengarten
• Film Resurrections and the Denial of Death | by Russell P. Johnson
• When a Vow Turns Out to be... a Vow: ‘Fleabag’ | by Richard A. Rosengarten
• Hate and Its Elusion | by Matthew Creighton

The George Floyd Protests and Race in the U.S.

• Special Issue on the George Floyd Protests | by Multiple Authors
• Protest and the Raging Messianic | by Foster J. Pinkney
• We Need Art to Help Us Heal, Now More than Ever | by Aneesah Ettress
• Protests, Looting, and Iconoclasm | by Nathan Hardy
• Asking the Right Questions about Riots | by Russell P. Johnson
• Stop Asking What the Bible Means to the President | by Seth Perry
• America’s Sirens | by Richard A. Rosengarten
• Toppling History? | by William Schweiker
• The Art of the Social Contract | by Richard A. Rosengarten 

Politics, Law, and Religion

• General Suleimani, U.S. Policy, and Jus ad Vim | by John Kelsay
• Who—or What—is Above the Law? | by William Schweiker
• Martin Buber’s Hope in Polarized Times | by Russell P. Johnson
• ‘The seeds of compassion and duty’: An Early Americanist Take on Healthcare | by Philippa Koch
• Scapegoating Mitt Romney | by John Fea
• The Black Church and LGBTQ People: Lessons Learned from #dems2020 | by Lerone Jonathan Wilder & Myriam Renaud
• Playing the Ostrich; or, How Not to Think about QAnon | by Richard A. Rosengarten
• How Republican Politicians Get Schooled on the Bible | by Margaret M. Mitchell
• In the Name of ‘Religious Liberty’ | by Ivan Strenski
• In What Do We Trust? | by William Schweiker
• Seeing a Religious Left | by Timothy Gutmann
• Moral Reckoning Under a Mushroom Cloud | by William George

Again, we hope you will enjoy our Sightings reading list for the summer break, but you should know that it’s only a sampling of what Sightings has published so far this year. We encourage you to visit our archives to explore the full collection. There you’ll also find every piece written this year by our outstanding team of columnists, led by Martin Marty along with Russell Johnson, Cynthia Lindner, Richard Rosengarten, and William Schweiker.
 
Finally, on a personal note, I want to say farewell to you, our readers. When Sightings returns in September it will welcome its tenth managing editor (soon to be named) as I move on to do more writing of my own. It has been an honor to serve you and the Marty Center as the editor of Sightings these past two years (and of the Religion & Culture Forum the two years prior). Publishing Sightings is a team effort, and I especially want to thank Willemien Otten, Martin Marty, Richard Rosengarten, Cynthia Lindner, William Schweiker, Josh Feigelson, Russell Johnson, David Nirenberg, Brett Colasacco, Terren Wein, Nathan Hardy, Erin James-Brown, Curtis Evans, Mark Lambert, Kris Culp, and Clark Gilpin, among others, each of whom has played a special part in bringing you Sightings during my editorship. And I want to express a heartfelt thanks to you, our readers—receiving your comments, questions, occasional corrections, and notes of support are highlights of this job. Thank you. I look forward to joining you now as a loyal reader and fellow “sighter” of religion in public life.
 
On behalf of the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion and all the people who make Sightings possible, thank you for your continued readership. We look forward to returning to your inbox once again when September rolls around. 
 
Sincerely,
The Editor

Image: University of Chicago students reading on the quad in 1937. (Photo courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago)

Sightings is edited by Joel Brown, a PhD Candidate in Religions in the Americas at the Divinity School. Sign up here to receive Sightings via email. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Marty Center or its editor.