Father Michael Pfleger, "Just a Parish Priest"

Assignment: to make sense of this week’s Sightings, please take 15 minutes or so to read Evan Osnos’s New Yorker story from this past winter (see “Resources” below). It focuses on a Chicago Catholic priest who has tended ferociously to the faithful in his several parish assignments. Attention to such is rather rare. We and our friends in the “news business”—on whose writings we draw as they cover the remarkable stories of the week—are trained to magnify the already-magnified on the religion beat: stories of saints, denominations and ecumenical agencies, commissions, and the like. But the more astute among these friends know, even if they cannot often devote themselves to it, that the power behind the magnified story comes from the micro-worlds of the local, as in congregations, parishes, cells, and local expressions in general.