Sex abuse and the study of religion

Kathryn Lofton understands the complex and fraught relationship between scholarship and the sexual abuse of children:

It is difficult to write or think about sex abuse without being affected by its circulating effects, without feeling that the very practices of academic analysis do something suffocating to its experience. To think about sex abuse in an academic context could suggest that we might wish to think away its awfulness; to write about sex abuse could suggest that we seek to argue away its visceral trauma.

Lofton is affiliated with a website called The Imminent Frame, which is concerned with the role of religion and secularism in modern society. They recently established an online database of the Catholic abuse crisis. (Yesterday I discussed the word 'abuse' itself, and its euphemistic tone, albeit in a different light.)