Sightings Articles
Catholics Weekly — Martin E. Marty
America, The National Catholic Weekly, the respected Jesuit magazine, attracts Sightings for its coverage of public topics. The current (and typical) issue, July 7-14, responsibly treats clerical sexual abuse, reporting on the week the bishops met an...
July 7, 2003
Grave Doubt about the "James Ossuary"
"'Jesus box' exposed as fake." This was the headline of a CNN.com story appearing on June 18 (and on the "ticker" of the cable network's Headline News that evening). The director of the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA), Shuka Dorfman, had announce...
June 26, 2003
Berlin Diplomacy — Martin E. Marty
The Berlin Journal of the American Academy in Berlin asked Michael Ignatieff, author of Empire Lite, Josef Joffe, publisher of Die Zeit, David Rieff, fellow at the Academy and author, and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, historian at Bielefeld, to take a look fro...
June 23, 2003
Marriage and Civil Society — W. Clark Gilpin
In a society that seems intent on subjecting every institution and daily practice to methodical cost-benefit analysis, the cadences of the marriage vow in the Book of Common Prayer are beginning to sound radical: ". . . for better for worse, for rich...
June 19, 2003
Bonhoeffer — Martin E. Marty
Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Buber, Baillie, and Berdyaev were some of the "B" titans who towered fifty years ago, but my part of my generation cut our theological teeth on another, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As exemplars, Catholics then had Thomas Merton, th...
June 16, 2003
Faithfully Considering Glocalization — Ira Rifkin
Pope John Paul II, at a Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences meeting in early May, issued one of his periodic critiques of globalization. He said that the process we call globalization -- the unprecedented spread of Western-style (some would substit...
June 12, 2003
Christian Orthodoxy — Martin E. Marty
Martha Stewart, Hillary Clinton, and Sammy Sosa crowded headlines last week, and there were the usual sensational religious stories of scandal to crowd out what most people think of as "religious." So, this week, let me look at a quiet, often overloo...
June 9, 2003
All Families, All Forms — Gloria Albrecht
I am a Presbyterian minister and one of the consultants called on by my denomination to examine the issue of changing families, the impact of these changes on children, and the social structures, policies, and programs that would enable the church to...
June 5, 2003
Census Canada — John G. Stackhouse, Jr.
Observers of religion and Canadian public life rejoice that the Canadian census, taken every ten years, asks questions about religious affiliation. Statistics Canada has now released its report on the religious components of the 2001 census, and thin...
May 29, 2003
World Vision — Martin E. Marty
Sighting flags and bunting in the park below the window of the study where I write inspires me. Not to join the hard-line flag-wavers who measure patriotism by the degree to which one supports or dissents against what our government does, but to reco...