Malls Are Closing All Across America. And Churches?

Tradition compels us to close shop at Sightings for August, but we hope and intend to be back to greet September, ff., with you. However, we keep thinking of one special fact in the human condition and situation: sooner or later, every thing on earth will close and will not reopen. One does not need scriptural reminders of this; we just do our sighting and have evidence. Having read much about “decline” in religion—hereabouts, not always globally—evidences abound. What prompts this choice of topic this week was the combination of two headlines in The New York Times last Thursday. One was “An Ode to Shopping Malls” by Steven Kurutz, and the other was “Country Stores Look for Someone to Hand the Keys To” by Julie Turkewitz. The first story is about a film series which chronicles how malls, “pleasure palaces of days past,” are reaching their end as “a way of life”; the second, about the slow disappearance of small-town hubs.