Sightings Articles
Meanwhile, United Methodists...
Editor's note: Sightings will be taking a short break for the Thanksgiving holiday. We'll be back Thursday, December 1st! Give us Sightings folks a headline with the phrase “Public Church” in it, and we are poised to follow through. The Center fro...
November 21, 2016
"A Hypothetical Miracle That Could Occur": Rudy's Augustine and Trump's Future
Surely one of the stranger moments of the recently completed U.S. presidential election season was when, on Sunday, October 9th, 2016, Rudy Giuliani compared Donald Trump to Augustine of Hippo. Speaking to John Dickerson on CBS’s Face the Nation, Giu...
November 17, 2016
A Poem for the 2016 Election
For the very first time, our usually prosaic Sightings column gives space this week to a poem, one rich in metaphor. It was written in 1919, but is seen as newly relevant. Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the fa...
November 14, 2016
An Event to Celebrate
September 24, 2016, marked one of the most significant moments in America’s history when its first African American president, Barack Obama, opened the National Museum of African American History and Culture on the nation’s mall in Washington, D.C. T...
November 10, 2016
Saints Displaced and Replaced
Saints are getting pushed around these years, if they are not being forgotten. Jews may not share the Christian belief in the Resurrection and the afterlife of saints, but few faith communities have done more to honor their dead, especially those who...
November 7, 2016
After Trump
Editor's note. This is the fourth and last installment in our series on the Trump phenomenon, or “Trumpism,” and what it reveals about the relationship between religion and politics in America today. Special thanks to our previous contributors: Roger...
November 3, 2016
Reformation Jostlings
On this day, 499 years ago, a friar proposed 95 theses for debate and “posted” them (in today’s world and words), meaning he mailed them to his superior, the Archbishop of Mainz, and/or nailed them to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Wh...
October 31, 2016
How Waiting 108 Years Makes the Good Life
For years, people have been asking me what I will do if the Chicago Cubs ever win the World Series. I don't actually know. The closest I've come to what that moment might be like was when the Cubs won the National League Division Series against the C...
October 27, 2016
Children on Christian or Secular Swings?
Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Pauley is a grabbing lawsuit name for those of us who do “sightings” of religion in American public life. It features in a story in The Kansas City Star (see “Resources” below). The suit has to do with whether c...
October 24, 2016
Saint Lonelyhearts
On September 4th the world witnessed a Holy Mass said by Pope Francis as Mother Teresa was elevated to sainthood. She is now known to the faithful as St. Teresa of Calcutta. While Mother Teresa was rightly celebrated for her care of the poor in the b...