Sightings Articles
Matrices — Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez
"The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes." One ca...
May 22, 2003
A Good Report? — Martin E. Marty
Next week Presbyterians will meet in Denver to kick off the denominational convention season and, as part of their agenda, vote on the findings of a Presbyterian Church (USA)-sponsored report called "Living Faithfully with Families in Transition." My...
May 19, 2003
The Political Pretension to Grand Values — W. Clark Gilpin
Jean Bethke Elshtain, ethicist and political philosopher at the University of Chicago, has recently challenged theologians and religiously concerned citizens to rethink the relationship of war to justice in light of the war on Iraq. Building on her o...
May 15, 2003
Generosity — Martin E. Marty
"Gauging Generosity," a recent headline in The Economist (May 3), assesses how nations rank in respect to their generosity toward others, i.e., "Which rich countries do most to help poor countries?" With its U.K. ("secular") base, the magazine did no...
May 12, 2003
A Letter from Jerusalem: Our Reflections — Ithamar Gruenwald
In a recent Sightings (April 3), Professor W. Clark Gilpin writes, “It is frequently the case in myth and religious narrative that things are not what they seem. Strangers, animals, even plants, turn out to be gods.” There are plenty of cases in our ...
May 8, 2003
Uncommon Cause — Martin E. Marty
Now that the U.S. proposal, or "road map," for Israel-Palestine futures is unfolding, most columnists, when they discuss American Jews, concentrate on highly-placed figures in the Bush administration. Some Jewish columnists also talk about the nature...
May 5, 2003
Good News for the Tolerant — Jonathan C. Gold
The Religion and Values department at Gallup recently initiated a new index called the "Gallup Religious Tolerance Index," which will now be part of Gallup's regular polling. To publicize this new initiative, Gallup organized an on-line seminar led b...
May 1, 2003
Nobody's Business — Martin E. Marty
Call this column "Exclusion II." We can't answer your e-mail responses, though we welcome them and learn from them. And we rarely repeat attention to a topic, since there are so many objects of our "sightings" out there to treat. But thoughtful respo...
April 28, 2003
Camera Pieta — Jeremy Biles
Perhaps no one still believes that photographs exhibit unadulterated reality. Photos, we know, are subject to any number of editorial, compositional, and other strategic effects that might be used not to display reality, but to convey ideology under ...
April 24, 2003
Exclusion — Martin E. Marty
"Exclusion," Carl Sandburg once said, was the ugliest word in the English language. Two kinds of exclusion appear in the sightings we do every week. It's important to keep them apart. In the first, particular religious communities welcome only the...