The power of religion as a symbolic, salvationÐpromising enterprise resides in its authority to create and shape reality for believers and command their obedience. This power can inspire tremendous acts of human kindness, charity, compassion, and hope. But witch hunts, inquisitions, crusades, and pogroms show us how religious authority can be used for far darker purposes. This abuse of power by religious authorities at the expense of their followers is termed clergy malfeasance by editor Anson Shupe and examined by the contributors to Wolves within the Fold.

The essays provide an innovative examination of behavior that is sometimes illegal and always unethical, sometimes punished but often not. Topics range from a cultural study of Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese apocalyptic group now infamous for releasing lethal gas into the Tokyo subway system, to a sociological analysis of financial scandals among evangelical religious groups. Groups analyzed include the Roman Catholic Church, Protestant denominations, televangelists, and the Hare Krishnas.

Recent gender-based scholarship on nineteenth-century American literature has established male authors' crucial awareness of the competition from popular women writers. And critical work in gay studies and queer theory has stressed the importance in canonical American literature of homoerotic relations between men, even before "homosexuality" became codified at the end of the century. Scott Derrick draws on these insights to explore the ways in which male authors struggle to refigure literature-historically devalued as feminine-as a masculine and heterosexual enterprise. Derrick focuses on scenes of compositional crisis that reveal how male identity itself is at risk in the perils and possibilities of being a male author in a feminized literary marketplace.

Property, Women, and Politics deconstructs and contests the concept of property. It also uses important insights in recent feminist thought to suggest productive directions for a reconstructed theory of property, one in which women's work counts. The reconstructed model is applied to such pressing areas of medical ethics as egg and sperm donation, contract motherhood, abortion, and the sale of fetal tissue. It also shows how we can radically revise our assumptions about the "marriage contract."

Two experts in public health and injury control show readers how guns are products, designed to injure and kill, and how changes in the design, technology, and marketing of firearms can lead to reductions in the number of injuries and fatalities.

Media, Culture and the Environment provides an accessible introduction to key issues and debates surrounding the media politics of risk assessment and the environment.

Opening when Stanton was twenty-five and Anthony was twenty, and ending when Congress sent the Fourteenth Amendment to the states for ratification, this volume recounts a quarter of a century of staunch commitment to political change. Readers will enjoy an extraordinary collection of letters, speeches, articles, and diaries that tells a story-both personal and public-about abolition, temperance, and woman suffrage.

When all six volumes are complete, the Selected Papers of Stanton and Anthony will contain over 2,000 texts transcribed from their originals, the authenticity of each confirmed or explained, with notes to allow for intelligent reading. The papers will provide an invaluable resource for examining the formative years of women's political participation in the United States. No library or scholar of women's history should be without this original and important collection.

Women's health is threatened by gender bias on three fronts: bias against women patients, bias against women doctors, health practitioners, and medical scientists, and bias against women as medical research subjects. Outrageous Practices, a highly acclaimed best-seller newly available in paperback, chronicles the history of a prejudiced health care establishment and shows how the current system remains captive to male-dominated medicine and research. The book examines how gender discrimination manifests itself in hospitals, physicians's and psychiatrists's offices, medical schools, research labs, government health-related agencies, and biomedical and pharmaceutical industries.