Sightings Articles
Remembering Martin Luther King — Martin E. Marty
Our house has always remembered Martin Luther and Martin Luther King. Our children sometimes confused the two. Son John's teacher once advised me to confront our six-year-old about his fibbing. "He claimed to have spent a week in a dormitory with Mar...
January 19, 2004
Candidates Hit the Sawdust Trail — James L. Evans
The 2004 presidential race is shaping up to be as much an old time religious revival as it is a political contest. Informed by consultants that sixty-two percent of American voters prefer candidates with religious convictions, Democratic presidential...
January 15, 2004
Polis — Martin E. Marty
No metropolis makes our mission of "sighting" religion in public life easier than Indianapolis. Decades ago, the BBC, for their classic world-religion TV series "The Long Search," chose the U.S. for its Protestant program (with me as the American con...
January 12, 2004
God, Politics, and the Democrats — Eric Haugen
There has been interest, recently, in the religious faith of the current crop of Democrats running for the presidential nomination. Howard Dean, the frontrunner, was interviewed on "Hardball" on MSNBC, by Chris Matthews and asked about his faith. Dea...
January 8, 2004
Personal Jesus — Martin E. Marty
Today is the Twelfth Day of Jesusmas, a.k.a. Christmas. The word Christmas, or "Christ"+ "mass," gives many citizens problems today. The mass part, an issue when anti-Catholicism was prime, is no scandal: Americans are patient with each others' ritua...
January 5, 2004
Kwanzaa — Martin E. Marty
In three more days Kwanzaa will end. If you are not an African-American, it will mean little to you. Ron Karenga, the inventor in 1966 of this "family, community, and culture" event timed to overlap and compete with Christmas observance, devised it a...
December 29, 2003
The Political Square, Festooned — Martin E. Marty
All is well in America at Christmas. The Wall Street Journal (December 19) cheers the superabundance of Christmas lighting around American homes. "Energy Puritans may denounce the inessential use of electricity," but aesthetic pleasure and low costs,...
December 22, 2003
Better Odds — Andrew Weaver and Christopher G. Ellison
Experts estimate that there are at least four million problem gamblers in the United States. As signs of gambling-related problems are not well known, nor understood, it is vital that faith communities be informed about the impact of gambling addicti...
December 18, 2003
Politics in the Pulpit — Martin E. Marty
"Clergy As Political Activists" takes up most of the December 2003 Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (JSSR), a special issue edited by Corwin Smidt. Smidt lined up 30 social scientists to survey and report on clergy: Evangelicals, Mainline...
December 15, 2003
For Gods and Country — William E. Middleton
As a University of Chicago Divinity School alumnus and ordained PC (USA) minister, my views place me in a certain context in the range of thought present in such a diverse religious group as the US Navy and US Navy Chaplain Corps where I serve as cha...