Description
Book SynopsisOne Sunday in February 1987, protesters stood outside the Unitarian Universalist Church of Amherst in Massachusetts, whose minister planned to hand out condoms during his sermon, dramatizing the need for the church to confront the AIDS crisis. The minister gave out nearly five hundred condoms as the audience exploded into applause. But he could not hang around to enjoy it; having received threats in advance of the service, he dashed out of the sanctuary immediately. Thus was the climate for religious AIDS activism in the mid-1980s. After the Wrath of God is the first book to tell the story of American religion and the AIDS epidemic. Anthony Petro shows how religious leaders and organizations posited AIDS as a religious and moral epidemic, and analyzes how this construction has informed cultural and political debates about public health and sexual morality. While most attention to religion and AIDS foregrounds the role of the Religious Right, this book examines the much broader-and more
Trade Review[O]f interest to graduate students in the social sciences. * Mary Jo Iozzio, Religious Studies Review *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion ; 1) Emerging Morality: American Christians, Sexuality, and AIDS ; 2) Governing Authority: C. Everett Koop and the Moral Politics of Public Health ; 3) Ecclesiastical Authority: AIDS, Sexuality, and the American Catholic Church ; 4) Protest Religion!: ACT UP, Religious Freedom, and the Ethics of Sex ; Afterword: We "Other Christians" ; Notes ; Bibliography ; Index
