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Vodou has often served as a scapegoat for Haiti’s problems, from political upheavals to natural disasters. This tradition of scapegoating stretches back to the nation’s founding and forms part of a contest over the legitimacy of the religion, both beyond and within Haiti’s borders. The Spirits and the Law examines that vexed history, asking why, from 1835 to 1987, Haiti banned many popular ritual practices.

To find out, Kate Ramsey begins with the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath. Fearful of an independent black nation inspiring similar revolts, the United States, France, and the rest of Europe ostracized Haiti. Successive Haitian governments, seeking to counter the image of Haiti as primitive as well as contain popular organization and leadership, outlawed “spells” and, later, “superstitious practices.” While not often strictly enforced, these laws were at times the basis for attacks on Vodou by the Haitian state, the Catholic Church, and occupying U.S. forces. Beyond such offensives, Ramsey argues that in prohibiting practices considered essential for maintaining relations with the spirits, anti-Vodou laws reinforced the political marginalization, social stigmatization, and economic exploitation of the Haitian majority. At the same time, she examines the ways communities across Haiti evaded, subverted, redirected, and shaped enforcement of the laws. Analyzing the long genealogy of anti-Vodou rhetoric, Ramsey thoroughly dissects claims that the religion has impeded Haiti’s development.

An interdisciplinary discussion engaging classics, archaeology, religious studies, and the social sciences

The Struggle over Class brings together scholars from the fields of New Testament and early Christianity to examine Christian texts in light of the category of class. Historically rigorous and theoretically sophisticated, this collection presents a range of approaches to, and applications of, class in the study of the epistles, the gospels, Acts, apocalyptic texts, and patristic literature. Contributors Alicia J. Batten, Alan H. Cadwallader, Cavan W. Concannon, Zeba Crook, James Crossley, Lorenzo DiTommaso, Philip F. Esler, Michael Flexsenhar III, Steven J. Friesen, Caroline Johnson Hodge, G. Anthony Keddie, Jaclyn Maxwell, Christina Petterson, Jennifer Quigley, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Daniëlle Slootjes, and Emma Wasserman challenge both scholars and students to articulate their own positions in the ongoing scholarly struggle over class as an analytical category.

As gay men and lesbian women increasingly gained recognition and acceptance in twentieth-century literature and film, and subsequently in social and political movements, the Catholic Church reacted by subtly moving away from its overt condemnation of homosexuality as an urgent moral problem and toward tacitly shunning homosexuality as an “unspeakable vice.” In this revealing history, Francesco Torchiani reconstructs the Catholic Church’s shifting attitudes toward homosexuality during this period by drawing on a vast array of internal documents and external accounts. This monograph expands the scholarship on the relationship between Catholicism and homosexuality in terms of both method and content, ultimately concluding that the Catholic Church continues to wholeheartedly condemn homosexuality despite making genuine efforts to reflect on and understand its social and cultural impact. The Unspeakable Vice therefore sheds new light on and places into historical perspective the questions the Catholic Church continues to reckon with regarding its role in contemporary society.

Dismantling the image of the peaceful and serene colonial goodwife and countering the assumption that New England was inherently less violent than other regions of colonial America, Emily C. K. Romeo offers a revealing look at acts of violence by Anglo-American women in colonial Massachusetts, from the everyday to the extraordinary. Using Essex County as a case study, Romeo deftly utilizes seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources to demonstrate that Puritan women, both “virtuous” and otherwise, learned to negotiate the shifting boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable violence in their daily lives and communities.

The Virtuous and Violent Women of Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts shows that more dramatic violence by women—including infanticide, the scalping of captors during the Indian Wars, and even witchcraft accusations—was not necessarily intended to challenge the structures of authority but often sprung from women's desire to protect property, safety, and standing for themselves and their families. The situations in which women chose to flout powerful social conventions and resort to overt violence expose the underlying, often unspoken, priorities and gendered expectations that shaped this society.

In These Words, liturgist Alden Solovy distills the Torah into its very essence: the individual words it contains. Echoing the midrash that the Torah has seventy faces, Solovy selects seventy of its Hebrew words that are pregnant with meaning. For each word, he delves into the etymology, translation, and usage, providing deeper insights into familiar texts. Then Solovy presents a beautiful poem—what he calls “poetic midrash”—inspired by and interpreting each word. From b’reishit (“in beginning”) to shamayim (“heavens”) to zachor (“remember”), These Words will change the way you look at the language of the Torah.

A groundbreaking exploration of the Jewish marriage contract and its evolution in English translation

Translating the Ketubah offers a fresh perspective on the ketubah, the Jewish marriage contract. Traditionally composed in Aramaic, ketubot have been examined in other books within the frameworks of Jewish law and Jewish art. Here, however, Benjamin Steiner shows how translations of the ketubah into English helped Jews adapt to changing social and economic circumstances across more than two centuries.

Steiner uses ketubot to trace the intricate relationship between religious law and secular law, the changing status of women within and outside Judaism, and the complex desire of Jews to be both authentically Jewish and fully acculturated. Steiner further shows how ketubah translation aided Jews to achieve different cultural goals. It has been used to uphold rabbinic law in communities where religious affiliation was voluntary to ensure women's economic security. It has also facilitated socialization with non-Jews and addressed perceived crises within the Jewish family.

Through a nuanced analysis of ketubah translations from England and various regions of the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present, Steiner offers a detailed look at how Jews have adapted ancient tradition to meet the challenges and opportunities of different historical contexts. His work sheds new light on the rich history of American and British Jewry.