"Love the Sin" to Focus on Sexuality, Religion

Janet Jakobsen, the director of the Center for Research on Women at Barnard College, will conduct an open conversation called "Love the Sin: Sexuality and Religion" in Thomas Hall's Quita Woodward Room next Friday, April 21, from 10:30 a.m. to noon. All are welcome to the event, which is sponsored by the Bryn Mawr-Haverford Program in Gender and Sexuality and the Greater Philadelphia Women's Studies Consortium.

Jakobsen, a professor of Women's Studies at Barnard, has published widely on feminist and queer ethics; religion, gender and sexuality in American public life; social movements and feminist alliance politics; and global issues of economics and violence. Her current book project is The Value of Ethics, Sex, Secularism and Social Movements in a Global Economy. She is the co-editor of Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence and the author of Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics as well as Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance.

In Love the Sin, Jakobsen and co-author Ann Pellegrini argue that the paradigm of religious freedom offers a better model than does biological determinism for achieving equal rights for sexual minorities. Urvashi Vaid, the former director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, hails its "analytical and strategic insights on the central obstacle to gay and lesbian freedom today: sexuality's treatment by religion. The authors' accessible voice, wide-ranging and original synthesis, and deep knowledge make the experience of reading this book a pleasure."

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