(PSA: trigger warning for language about rape, violence). The summer I was finishing my M.A. in philosophy, I started receiving threatening phone calls. A male voice, sometimes low and menacing, other times high-pitched and enraged, telling me what he planned to do to me – plans involved rape, cutting, dismemberment. He called me obscene names, told me he knew where I lived, that he knew I lived with my sister. He’d do her too, he said. For homeschool kids, we... Read more

“… I assure you of my spiritual closeness and my sharing in your concern for the continuing holocaust of innocent human lives…” wrote John Paul II to Cardinal Bernard Law, in a December, 1997 letter. The word “holocaust,” has clear and somber implications, especially for anyone in the Jewish community. Even when used with a small “h” it carries connotations of the Shoah: and thus the burden of the intolerable and unspeakable in human history – recent human history, as both... Read more

As more reports emerge about the scope of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and the scale of sexual harassment and assault in general, we are turning our attention increasingly to the conditions in which what is often termed “rape culture” flourishes. Toxic masculinity. Locker-room attitudes. A society that commodifies female sexuality. Capitalist, colonialist notions about possession and power. Normalization of predatory attitudes towards sex. The idea that a woman who doesn’t “put out” is somehow a prude. These conditions exist across... Read more