Tracy Fessenden

Tracy Fessenden teaches in the Department of Religious Studies and the Program in Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author, most recently, of Culture and Redemption: Religion, the Secular, and American Literature (Princeton UP, 2007); “’The Secular’ as Opposed to What?” (New Literary History, Autumn 2007); and of contributions to the volumes Catholics in the Movies, ed. Colleen McDannell (Oxford UP, 2007) and Secularisms, ed. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (Duke UP, 2008).

Posts by Tracy Fessenden:

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

Sex and the subject of religion

secular_age.jpgThe current campaign within the Archdiocese of New York to canonize the radical activist Dorothy Day (1897-1980) offers a good example of what Elizabeth Povinelli, writing here on December 13 (”Can Sex be a Minor Form of Spitting?”), calls the “mutual conditions and secret agreements” that tie the sexual revolution and Catholic teaching together behind the scenes—and of the “transformation in the field of sin” sealed in their alliance. It isn’t simply that the candor with which Cardinal O’Connor and now Cardinal Egan have described Day’s sexual agency, single motherhood, and presumed abortion signals the Church’s accommodation to new, post-1960s norms of frankness.

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Posted in A Secular Age, Sex in A Secular Age | 3 Comments » |