In the interest of discussing how religion and sexuality stand beside each other in ways that generate unexpected political and affective fields, the papers assembled here discuss the ways sex and eroticism operate as potentialities in relation to anything religious. Taking their lead from both recent controversies and those that endure and remain volatile within intellectual and religious traditions-periodically erupting into public consciousness and politics-the papers attend to the following

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... broad themes: sacred bodies, eroticism and the cultivation of self, the sexuality of religious personages, iconography and pornography, and the sexuality of gods. The approach stands opposed to more familiar elaboration of the different ways institutional religions regulate and administer sex. Through their explorations of the intimacy found between religion and sex within the weaves of everyday life, the authors bring religion and sexuality into fresh and productive juxtapositions that illuminate aspects of each that are often obscured. Recent public outrage over pedophilia in the Catholic Church, the simmering tensions revealed by cartoon depictions of the prophet Mohammed, and the longstanding consternation about the copulation of gods-whether with animals or humans-suggest the sometimes explosive affects that arise when sexuality unexpectedly erupts within the religious. The articles assembled here discuss how religion and sexuality stand beside each other in ways that generate unexpected political fields, and they explore the long held intimacy between religious and erotic experience. As opposed to asking how institutional religions regulate and administer sex, the authors question the ways sex and eroticism operate as potentialities in relation to anything borderlands 9:3