Sightings: Religion in Public Life

07/01/2022

"There is a danger in softening Tutu’s legacy, but we make the same mistake in the opposite direction if we forget his contagious, all-embracing joy." - The Revolutionary Joy of Desmond Tutu by Russell Johnson https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/articles/revolutionary-joy-desmond-tutu?fbclid=IwAR1T2EACaCU04hkTSyftyIP1eOOlSFKeGqTluXGSxveBeLomwZ7Bi_4GuQc

There is a danger in softening Tutu’s legacy, but we make the same mistake in the opposite direction if we forget his contagious, all-embracing joy.

02/12/2021

"If we focus on policing acceptable political ideas via the state, we do more to undermine democracy than to secure it." Extremism and Defense of Democracy by Timothy Gutmann https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/articles/extremism-and-defense-democracy

We hear more and more that democracy is in danger. With the presidency of Donald Trump and the rise of the political far right, talk of democratic backsliding has moved from the academy to popular discourse. For many in the US, the threat to democracy is epitomized by the storming of the Capitol bui...

11/11/2021

Richard A. Rosengarten | Liberalism’s Faith - https://mailchi.mp/uchicago/sightings-217874

04/11/2021

Russell Johnson | The Irony of Facebook | Social media sites draw upon the natural desire to have friends but can make it more difficult to truly connect. - https://mailchi.mp/uchicago/sightings-217866

28/10/2021

Johari Jabir | We Are Building Up A New World - Critical Race Theory’s Progressive Vision vs the Southern Baptist Convention’s Regressive Politics https://mailchi.mp/uchicago/sightings-217818

21/10/2021

David Justice | On Prophetic Rage - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had a prophetic rage that rejected the status quo and strove for a just and loving community: we should too. https://mailchi.mp/uchicago/sightings-217826

14/10/2021

John T. Pawlikowski and Malka Z. Simkovich | Pope Francis And The Jewish Law (Torah) - Pope Francis accepts Vatican II's Nostra Aetate, but has yet to fully extricate himself from two millennia's teachings of contempt https://mailchi.mp/uchicago/sightings-217822

07/10/2021

Richard A. Rosengarten | Sunday Mournings - "Sunday worship was valorized as something it was not, but the 'new normal' could turn out to be something that warrants renewed hope." Read more: https://mailchi.mp/uchicago/sightings-217802

30/09/2021

"We hoped that 'Back to School' rituals might turn the page, but beginnings are never as straightforward and uncomplicated as we wish they could be..." Beginning Again… and Again… and Again by Cynthia G. Lindner, https://mailchi.mp/uchicago/sightings-217786

09/09/2021

Russell Johnson discusses what can make conspiracy theories compelling: https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/articles/conspiracy-theories-and-human-psychology

If we pinned the biggest news stories of the year to a corkboard and unspooled some yarn to trace the connections, what would link these events? One obvious connection would be the role that conspiracy theories play in American culture.

28/06/2021

William Schweiker discusses what masks have concealed and revealed about our society.

To note a truism: it has been a difficult, trying, sometimes fascinating, mostly exhausting year. How does one capture in one column the sense and non-sense of the year or so that has been 2020-2021? And how could such a rough sketch be a sighting of religion? One thing I would recommend, if I may,....

24/06/2021

Matthew Vanderpoel (PhD '20) reflects on a recently released darkwave album to discuss the relation between popular music and religion.

Darkwave artist Cold Cave's recent album, "Fate in Seven Lessons," sheds light on the complexities of popular culture's interaction with religion

21/06/2021

Richard Rosengarten reflects on a year of educational contradictions.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. To a notable extent, most students brought their best selves to class sessions. They were determined to do their work and to be proactively civil in their interactions with one another. Yet (through no one’s fault) these virtues were “remote,....

17/06/2021

Johari Jabir reflects on the close relation between the Jewish and Black prophetic witness.

Now let us sing Sing til the power of the Lord come down Lift up your heads, don’t be afraid Now let us sing til the power of the Lord come down -Gospel Song June 19, 2021 marks the 156th anniversary of Juneteenth, the celebration enacted by formerly enslaved Africans who received official word of...

14/06/2021

Cynthia Lindner discusses the opportunity and necessity of creatively reimagining traditions as we return to normal.

A year ago, as COVID-19 was surging and the US death toll was rising, a culture unprepared for the wages of suffering sought solace in spiritual practices old and new. We celebrated the compassionate and courageous work of hospital chaplains who kept vigil with the dying and held space for grief in....

10/06/2021

Alexus McLeod reflects on what a Maya text can teach us about loss and death.

Over 600,000 people in the United States alone have died of Covid-19 over the last year and a half. Some experts believe the actual number is closer to 900,000 in the US. Over 3.5 million people (also certainly a vast undercount) have died worldwide. This is of course in addition to all the other th...

07/06/2021

Russell Johnson discusses what can be concealed when we describe violence as religious.

A month ago, violence broke out at al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem. As the BBC reported, Israeli police fired rubber bullets and stun grenades as Palestinians threw stones and bottles. The timing and location of these events is significant. The violence occurred right after around 90,000 Palestinia...

03/06/2021

Lisa Landoe Hedrick (PhD '19) discusses Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy and how it might help us today.

It is by this point a truism to say that our country is deeply polarized. A recent editorial in the New York Times frames this polarization in terms of social belonging, and suggests that our sense of community can override our grasp of the factual world. This assumes a clean distinction between our...

31/05/2021

Eileen C. Donovan offers a veteran's perspective on the meaning of Memorial Day.

Any Chicago sports fan knows what it is like to believe in your team with a strong and devoted fervor, only to find yourself disappointed. It is a well-worn story of our beloved teams finding themselves with the advantage on the scoreboard, in their field position, or by some other metric, only to h...

27/05/2021

Scott Ferguson (PhD '20) discusses our looming national debt crisis and how to think about the ethical questions it raises.

Debt presents a political and economic quandary. The scale of the question is enormous: if in America it’s student debt that has seen the most discussion, still this amounts to $1.7 trillion out of a total personal debt burden of $14.6 trillion (more now than at any other time in our nation’s hi...

24/05/2021

William Schweiker reflects on the problem of communal self-awareness.

Normally, fairy tales like Snow White are not the stuff of Sightings columns. But sometimes simple stories can reveal ourselves to ourselves. After all, we live in a house of mirrors, and the endless refraction of visions of our nation and our world confronts us with ourselves. Mirror, mirror, on th...

20/05/2021

Zach Parris discusses the lessons for religious communities to be read in the failure of the European Super League.

Liverpool and Manchester United, two of the largest and most popular soccer clubs in the world, were scheduled to play on Sunday, May 2. The day of the match, thousands of United supporters gathered around the stadium to protest, blocking the players’ entrance to the stadium; another protest surro...

17/05/2021

Richard Rosengarten discusses the social implications of wearing a moral choice on our faces.

As the default setting for discussions of COVID has shifted to percentages of inoculation, the question of masks and masking has become a secondary, albeit to some still pressing, consideration. I have found myself nothing less than obsessed with masks and masking throughout the pandemic, not least....

13/05/2021

Michelle C. Sanchez discusses the strange moral power of misrecognition.

Last August, I read a piece by Jon Baskin in the New York Review of Books that stuck with me. Baskin’s essay offers a reflection toward an “antifascist aesthetic,” taking its point of departure from some lukewarm film reviews that misrecognize the point of Terrence Malik’s A Hidden Life.

10/05/2021

Stephen C. Rowe discusses the pragmatism of William James and its importance for a world riddled with crises.

With “whack-a-mole” as a tempting metaphor for this moment, we are still experiencing endless crises. In the onslaught, some of our fellow citizens are driven to exhaustion and dysfunction, attempting to whack all moles that pop their heads up. Others turn away in the post-apocalyptic conclusion...

06/05/2021

Christian Sheppard (PhD '02) reflects on sacred time within a baseball game.

Writing about “Sacred Time,” the great scholar of religion Mircea Eliade observed that humans everywhere and always express “a nostalgia for eternity:” we “long for a concrete paradise ... here, on earth, and now, in the present moment.”[1] Jews, Christians, and Muslims look back to the ...

03/05/2021

Russell Johnson discusses how moral philosophy helps us understand what makes movie characters compelling.

Earlier this year, fans of the superhero genre were given Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a four-hour epic that hewed closer to the director’s original plan than the poorly-received 2017 film Justice League, which Snyder had to step away from during post-production. In the wake of the 2017 release...