Sightings Articles
Change in Church and State Relations
Concepts and practices of religious freedom...
December 14, 2015
Missing From Conversations About San Bernardino Attack—The Main Point: Education!
Amid the shrieks and din of presidential candidates like Donald Trump calling for a moratorium on the immigration of Muslim to our shores, ISIS’ ranting about apocalyptic warfare between Islam and non-Muslims in the West, and President Obama assuring...
December 10, 2015
"Religious Freedom" After 50 Years?
December 7th: Sightings notes the date because fifty years ago today, by a vote of 2,308 to 70, the “Council Fathers” at the Second Vatican Council voted to promulgate Dignitatis Humanae, “On the Dignity of the Human Person.”Regarded as one of the ma...
December 7, 2015
Why is the West Obsessed with Western Women Who Become "Jihadi Brides"?
In high school, I had a bumper sticker: “feminism is the radical notion that women are people too.” Now, as a scholar of women’s and gender studies, I realize that this is not a great definition, and neglects a lot of nuance. Still, every time I read...
December 3, 2015
Rifts in the Mormon Family: What Just Happened?
Earlier this month, on Nov. 5th, the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints quietly changed a handbook that is available only to church leaders. The changes stipulated that any Mormons in same-sex marriages were to be con...
November 19, 2015
Public Orthodoxy
When a message from Public Orthodoxy reaches us, we read it and resolve to do better at sighting Eastern Orthodoxy for this e-column. The subtitle of Public Orthodoxy is “Bridging the Ecclesial, the Academic and the Political,” which points to three ...
November 16, 2015
A Legacy Greater Than “I-Thou”: A Usable Bible and a Usable Martin Buber
What can German-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber still offer us fifty years after his death?...
November 12, 2015
Secularization in the U.S.: Overblown Or Underestimated?
Self-professed atheists are the tip of a vastly larger secular population of nonbelievers and nominal believers....