Martin E. Marty

Christian Post Contributor

Martin E. Marty's biography, current projects, upcoming events, publications, and contact information can be found at www.illuminos.com. Original Source: Sightings – A biweekly, electronic editorial published by the Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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  • Lawson's Return

  • A New Use for ''Cults''?

    I spotted a new idea, or at least a new idea to me, for approaching terrorism, a phenomenon fraught with religious significance, or at least significance that scholars of religion might probe. This one comes from psychologist Marc Sageman, whose Understanding Terror Networks I must now read, and which was commented on by columnist David Ignatius in the Washington Post Weekly (September 18-24). Some may find Sageman and Ignatius wildly optimistic because, unlike so many administration and militar

  • Muslim-Protestant Relations

    "Dumb me!" one says or thinks – at least this one does – when awakened to knowledge of what one's sleepy eyes and consciousness had long overlooked. For a half-century, I, like the colleagues of my generation among American religious historians, could babble for thousands of hours and write thousands of pages and yet show little awareness and make slight mention of Muslim-Protestant relations in this nation. Change for me began in 1988, when we started the "Fundamentalism Project," a g

  • Heeding Edward O. Wilson

    A former Southern Baptist spends her or his post-Baptist years trying to make sense of, and sometimes fighting, the past, and seeing what elements of it might be resources for the future. Former Southern Baptist Edward O. Wilson makes no effort to minimize his transformation: "I am a secular humanist." Winner of two Pulitzers and wearer of the National Medal of Science, Harvard biologist Wilson in the New Republic, where too few people will see it, writes a friendly letter to an imagined Souther

  • Civic Pedagogy and Violence

    Readers of Sightings through most of a decade may have noticed that the concept driving it is "pedagogy," not "ideology." What José Ortega y Gasset called being a "civic pedagogue" is appealing as a vocation. Some subscribers, to most of whom we cannot respond even as we learn from them, ask for "other," meaning "more." Being a self-appointed pedagogue itself can sound arrogant and condescending, so we have to hope readers will keep in mind Whitehead's definition of a teacher: an ignorant p

  • Going the Way of Masonry

    Summer travels off the interstate highways and onto byways, where vestiges of earlier American civilization(s) linger, often lead to passing visions of neglected, boarded-up, or refashioned Masonic Lodge buildings. Just as numberless Catholic church buildings have been deconsecrated, demolished, and remade into clubs and bars, or, most creatively, into churches for African-American congregations that are at home in inner cities, so these buildings speak of a lost past. And just as great numbers

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