Sightings Articles
Voices Seldom Heard -- Martin E. Marty
Last week we mentioned how rare have been the reported-on voices of religious figures questioning the potential war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Also rarely reported on are religious questionings of American responses after 9/11. Maybe there have ...
August 13, 2002
Nietzsche and The Prayer of Jabez -- Brian Britt
Since its appearance two years ago, Bruce Wilkinson's The Prayer of Jabez (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, 2000) has sold over six million copies and has led to the creation of a small industry -- the Breakthrough Series -- based on prayers th...
August 9, 2002
Ironies of the American Present -- Martin E. Marty
"Reinhold Niebuhr, where are you now when we need you?" in effect asks David Brooks, a not unastute correspondent in The Atlantic Monthly (September, 2002). He beckons the ghost of the towering Protestant theologian and social critic of a half centur...
August 5, 2002
Fast Food Communion -- James L. Evans
There is an enduring wisdom behind the expression “we are what we eat.” Recent warnings from the public health sector that obesity has reached epidemic status in this country certainly lends credence to this culinary proverb. And if it is true that w...
August 2, 2002
Facing the Fallout -- Martin E. Marty
Stories about the sexual abuse crisis in Catholicism have moved from the "feeding frenzy" to the "facing fallout" stages. Headlines announcing continued Wall Street traumas have not quite crowded priest-and-bishop news from the public eye. A sampling...
July 31, 2002
A Letter from Jerusalem -- Ithamar Gruenwald
Dear Friends, I hope that this finds you well. I am writing from the city whose name signifies, in Hebrew, wholeness and peace. Today was a quiet day in the city. I even ventured downtown. There are days in which the downtown is a ghost city....
July 25, 2002
Of Sociology, Theology, and Bibliography -- Martin E. Marty
To publish is, by definition, to go public. So religious publishing fits our category of "public religion." Evangelical publishing has gone public in such impressive ways that secular publishers compete for its authors and markets, and some (bad) eva...
July 22, 2002
The Afflicted and The Comfortable -- Jennifer M. Cole
In "The Limits of Mother's Day and Father's Day" ( HYPERLINK "http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/sightings/archive_2002/0613.html" Sightings, 6/13/02) Reverend James L. Evans asked us to "find a way to affirm those families that work hard everyday to b...
July 18, 2002
Faith in the Faith-based -- Murray Friedman
In his column "Concerning Faith-based Initiatives," ( HYPERLINK "http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/sightings/archive_2002/0624.html" Sightings, June 24, 2002) Martin E. Marty raises questions about a piece written by John J. DiIulio, Jr., former head ...
July 15, 2002
When the Secular Is Not Secular -- Sheila Suess Kennedy
Religious matters are increasingly in the news. There are the controversies over abuse in the Catholic Church, eruptions of European anti-Semitism in the wake of Arab-Israeli violence, and solemn arguments about the nature of Islam in the wake of 9/1...