Like the good religion/bad religion dichotomy familiar to religious studies scholars, the good law/bad law dichotomy structures implicit judgments of…
The myth of secular law as savior
sexual abuse
Abuse crisis: Shifting boundaries between church and state
The meaning and the consequences of the abuse crisis will be far-reaching and it will take a long time to…
Sex and the Catholic Church: What does law have to do with it? Introduction
This series of essays aims to open up, with respect to the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, the…
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, something dead
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, which opened this past spring and will…
Revisited: Sex abuse and the study of religion
In summer 2010, Robert Orsi, Terence McKiernan, and I began a conversation about the sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church.…
Charisma and seduction
Producers, actors, politicians, businessmen, and professors: acclaimed men in these professions have recently been exposed as perpetrators of sexual violence.…
A changing papacy?
On December 11, Time Magazine named Pope Francis its 2013 “Person of the Year.” The award, according to Time, seeks to honor the…
Encountering the archive
Where on earth to begin with the rich but deeply disturbing material presented to us on BishopAccountability.org? (For an example,…
Sister Martin Ignatius explains not very much at all for you
Ever since I was first asked to offer reflections on the study of religion and the Catholic sex abuse crisis, it…
The church, the state, and the child
The child, as the psychoanalytic theorist Adam Phillips points out, “remains our most convincing essentialism.” By this he means that at…