Sightings Articles
Casaubon's Revenge: Popular Representations of the Scholar of Religion
What does popular culture tell us about who studies religion? Given that popular representations are more likely to shape public perceptions of the field than either direct experience in the classroom or statistics about graduation rates and job plac...
September 27, 2018
Renaming the Whirlwind
Hurricane Florence and Typhoon Mangkhut, and last year’s Hurricane Maria, not only left devastation and death in their wakes, but also provoked religious questions. They have certainly exposed the moral fiber of a culture, sometimes to its shame. ...
September 24, 2018
Muslims at the American Table
Ed. Note: This column is adapted from the author’s recent book, Out of Many Faiths: Religious Diversity and the American Promise (Princeton University Press, 2018). Chaim Potok’s classic novel The Chosen centers on the friendship between two teena...
September 20, 2018
Victorianism in Postmodernity?
Ed. Note: This column contains some spoilers for FX’s recently completed series The Americans. The word “Victorian” can conjure, or be used to conjure, a variety of associations: order and decorum, inhibition, an emphatic moral code inevitably at ...
September 17, 2018
Catholic versus Muslim "Terrorism" in the U.S.: A Double Standard
A double standard...
September 13, 2018
Dead Lions
The clock ticked relentlessly as a typical faculty party of long ago was breaking up. Senior and superstar professor Mircea Eliade suddenly spoke during the scramble for coats. “Why does everyone talk about ‘dead lions’ with such urgency?” he asked. ...
September 10, 2018
Reading Arendt, Connecting the Dots
You may remember a moment during this news-saturated summer when suicide was atop the national headlines. Two famous people, Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, took their lives days apart, and for a brief period the events of the Trump administration g...
September 6, 2018
Announcing Sightings, the Book
As in previous years, Sightings will be on hiatus during the month of August as we plan and prepare for the season ahead. When we come back, you will notice some changes to our traditional publication pattern. Since the founding of Sightings in th...
August 2, 2018
Sighting Farm Religion
“The Ruin of Farm Country,” a headline in Thursday’s New York Times, would ordinarily draw little notice. Only two percent of American citizens farm, and they may seem as remote as Afghanistan to urbanites today. Add in another five or ten percent fo...
July 30, 2018
Queer Eye for the Christian Mother
The second season of the Netflix series Queer Eye was released on June 15, 2018, and the first episode is called “God Bless Gay.” Queer Eye was recently renewed for a third season after receiving four Emmy nominations in 2018. Like the earlier progra...