Introduction: Moral Crusades Then and Now: Religious and Secular

This introduction frames the papers that follow in terms of an overlapping project of recognizing asymmetries and shifts as communities seek to draw lines between church and state, private values and public morality, insiders and outsiders, and reconcilable and irreconcilable differences. The ideas of the religious and secular sometimes fold into each other or split apart to make new alignments, changing the fixed position of the very people who sought to sharply define themselves against their supposed opposites. Hybrids, mixtures, blurrings, overlaps, change—these are the representations that rule here; in this discussion all reject the possibility of maintaining the boundary between the sacred and the profane.