The Ivy League Christian Observer arrives quarterly, beckoning for attention, which Sightings provides.

Almost always Sightings takes off from the sighting of a particular recent news event. This week, for fun and games, we’ll make an exception and address a generic theme: the religious left.

Thoughtful religious leaders have to work to promote affiliation and commitment as they seek and sometimes find company among the non-religious who would stir interest in the deeper things of life. This is a mission for them in a time of when gloss is favored in many sub-cultures.

When Will Herberg wrote the canonical book Protestant-Catholic-Jew in the mid-fifties, Evangelicals appeared to be marginal at best. In recent decades they make the news more often and they are more exploited by and influential among politicians and public life than are the many breeds of Protestants. Let’s look in on the Evangelicals.

News of theological seminaries does not usually appear in public media unless someone who is part of one of them creates scandal and cannot go unnoticed and not-covered. This week, therefore, this e-column has to take on a different character.

Suppose I’d been unconscious since March 13 and just learned that there’d been a papal election. Suppose I asked “you” for details, you answered, and I responded.

Forget, for the moment, popes and budgets and March Madness, shall we? This week we dispense with headlines and blogs and releases, unless the latter are three-hundred or three-thousand years old.