Sightings Articles

Jagged rows of blue and black TV noise dots form a dizzying pattern

distraction | Technology | secularism

Attention, Please

A culture of distraction may detract from religiosity and lead to lazy secularism....

September 22, 2022
hands raised by cross

Evangelicalism | Christian Nationalism | global Christianity

A Global Perspective on American Evangelical Politics

White American evangelical Trumpism is a lot more white and more American than it is evangelical....

September 13, 2022

religious affiliation | religious ethics | syncretism

What is Religious Appropriation and Why Does it Matter?

Accusations of cultural appropriation are increasingly common. But as a religious ethicist, I am not sure that is a good thing....

September 9, 2022
Image, made available by the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, shows students at a Presbyterian boarding school in Sitka, Alaska in the summer of 1883. (Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia via AP)

Native Americans | colonialism | Pope Francis

Reckoning with Re-education: Christianity’s Role in Native American Boarding Schools

American Christians must reckon with colonial history and cooperate with US government's “Road to Healing" initiative....

July 6, 2022
brown jackson swear in

religious identity | U.S. Supreme Court | American religion

Weary (and Wary) of Decisions, Opinions, and Polemics? Religious Wisdom Would Like a Word

Religion that is prescribed by a privileged few to control the lives of the many obfuscates human dignity, limits and cheapens life abundant, substitutes the trivial for the transcendent, and elevates a cruel justice that cannot admit its need for me...

July 1, 2022
abortion supporters protest 1960's

abortion | U.S. Supreme Court | reproductive freedom

Bad Faith History: The End of Roe v. Wade and The Supreme Court’s Myth about Abortion in the United States

The world that the Court’s opinion imagines is intimately (and frighteningly) consonant with a white, Christian nationalist vision of our nation....

July 1, 2022
Moss hearing

Christian Nationalism | religious ethics | Christian Right

Duty! Thou Sublime and Mighty Name

In responding to duty, we testify to our worth and our dignity as free human beings....

June 28, 2022
wadonwadas

jihad | eco-socialism | capitalism | Islamic-left politics | Indonesia

Jihad Against Capitalism: FNKSDA and the Islamic Eco-socialist Movement in Indonesia

A group of environmental activists in Indonesia see Islamic values as necessitating a struggle for socialism....

June 23, 2022
burnt amazon forrest

environmentalism | political religion | social justice

Human Goods, Environmental Evils

The same mastery of nature (human and nonhuman) that has made civilization possible now imperils us....

June 16, 2022
empty classroom with chairs

gun violence | gun legislation | political partisanship

Thoughts and Prayers

As inhabitants of the only country in the world where school shootings are routine, the American faithful must not pray for serenity, but for courage....

June 8, 2022