Amy DeRogatis

What would Jesus do? Sexuality and salvation in protestant evangelical sex manuals, 1950s to the present

When President Bill Clinton testified before a Grand Jury hearing on August 17, 1998 that he “did not have sexual intercourse with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” the American public learned at least two important lessons. First, the definition of sex was debatable and second, the authority to define sex as sexual intercourse was the crucial factor in the meaning of that pesky verb “is.” The questions of what is sex and, more importantly, who defines it have been studied and discussed thoroughly by scholars of U.S. history and culture. In American popular culture the social scientific findings published in the Kinsey Reports (1948, 1953) and William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnsons Human Sexual Response (1966) provided information (or “scientific facts”) for lay people regarding the diversity and possibility of human sexual expression: what sex “is.” The growing awareness since the late 1950s that sex is more than one specific act has led many people to question whether sex as we learn it from our parents, teachers, clergy, friends, books, and science is “natural” (a matter of biological response) or socially constructed (a matter of cultural control). Opinions vary, tempers flare, and the mountain of sex advice manuals available at local bookstores attests to the U.S. publics insatiable appetite for knowledge about sex.

Turning students into scholars: using digital methods to teach the critical study of religion

ABSTRACT Incorporating digital tools into Religious Studies courses provides experiences and conditions that transform students into scholars. In this essay we discuss two courses we taught in conjunction with the Religious Soundmap Project of the Global Midwest, a collaborative digital humanities project that we co-directed from 2014 to 2016. Engaging students as contributors to a collaborative digital research project helped them to appreciate some of the key practical, theoretical, and ethical challenges that we face as scholars of religion. In particular, our work together brought to the fore critical questions about definition, classification, and representation. Even more, because they knew their work would be accessible to broader audiences outside the classroom, potentially including the very communities whom they were studying, students were able to perceive the stakes of these questions in ways we had not previously experienced. Incorporating digital tools enabled our students to see themselves as scholars of religion.