Listening to the Snake; or, On Having a Spine

The western prohibition of reflection on what we call today religion begins not with a banned scholarly monograph or a taunted academic, but with a myth about a transgressive desire for mature moral knowledge and a subsequent sexual emotion, namely, Adam and Even\u27s shameful sense of being naked after accepting the serpent\u27s gift of the knowledge of good and evil. Elsewhere, I have explored some of the ways that western religions thought has sexualized this foundational myth in order to take up this gnosis as my own and explore the problems and promises of sexual desire, gender difference, sexual orientation, love, mortality, and -- above all -- the inescapably transgressive nature of radical thinking about religion in the contemporary academy