comstock laws

In 1995, following a spate of lethal violence against abortion providers across the United States, Catholic bioethicist Dr. G. Kevin Donovan predicted that the abortion movement faced an imminent…

In January the far-right website Townhall began publishing a four-part series on a so-called “Suburban LGBTQ Pedophile Ring.” The series, written by Townhall fact-checker Mia Cathell , claims to…

While his name may not be familiar to most Americans, for 40 years, between 1873 and 1915, the mutton chopped and cherubic faced Anthony Comstock was one of the more powerful and feared people in…

What inspired you to write Selling Yoga? Near the beginning of my graduate school career, I had the opportunity to travel to Rajasthan to research Jain traditions and came upon the Jain Shvetambara…

As scholar Scott Kugle knows well, to be both Muslim and gay means the possibility of having to “come out twice”—with the likely chance of encountering either homophobia or Islamophobia (or both), depending on the context.

A recent NYT op-ed insists that it was Vivekananda who introduced yoga into the American “national conversation.” But that claim is flat-out wrong. I’m not suggesting that we ignore Vivekananda’s proven significance in the history and development of modern yoga, but the story is much more complex than what Bardach implies. She seems to suggest, after all, that it’s as simple as: Vivekananda introduced yoga to the West, “great minds” loved him, yoga was eventually co-opted by New Age baby-boomers, and it all went downhill from there.

“It was what I found in the archives that inspired me to write the book—Craddock’s unpublished book manuscripts on everything from ancient sex worship to contemporary marriage reform. And then there was her journal of mystical experiences—a diary so baffling and intense in its combination of spiritualism and sexuality as to demand attention.”

An order of queer nuns, founded in San Francisco thirty-one years ago, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is now a full-fledged pastoral and charitable organization, having given away more than a million dollars. They’ve also raised pioneers in LGBT and AIDS/HIV rights to sainthood, creating their own holy calendar.

How did Christianity become so commercial? Is religious punk rock an oxymoron? The author of a new book on suburban evangelicalism and Christian heavy metal shows how Christian youth culture has been commodified and sold to secular audiences.