High above Lake Como in Lombardy, overlooking the cathedral city of Como and the southwestern branch of the lake, looms the tiny village of Brunate. It is a picturesque spot, beloved of mountain climbers, which enjoyed a brief heyday as a tourist mecca in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An efficient if ear-popping funicular railway, inaugurated in 1894, now scales the steep cliff in a brisk seven minutes. But in the Middle Ages, when most of our story is set, Brunate was as remote and inaccessible a site as one could hope to find. A hagiographer around 1600 described it as an “ignoble village on that mountain whose vast ridge towers above the city to the east.… The mountain is arduous and laborious to climb.” In 1578 the village had a mere 156 inhabitants, and as late as 1900 its year-round population was barely over 500.

Few acts of the Scottish parliament can have had such deadly consequences as the following, passed on June 4, 1563: Anentis Witchcraftis.

ITEM Forsamekill as the Quenis Majestie and thre Estatis in this present Parliament being informit, that the havy and abominabill superstitioun usit be divers of the liegis of this Realme, be using of Witchcraftis, Sorsarie and Necromancie, and credence gevin thairto in tymes bygane aganis the Law of God: And for avoyding and away putting of all sic vane superstitioun in tymes tocum: ¶ It is statute and ordanit be the Quenis Majestie, and thre Estatis foirsaidis, that na maner of persoun nor persounis, of quhatsumever estate, degre or conditioun thay be of, tak upone hand in ony tymes heirefter, to use ony maner of Witchcraftis, Sorsarie or Necromancie, nor gif thame selfis furth to have ony sic craft or knawlege thairof, thairthrow abusand the pepill: Nor that na persoun seik ony help, response or cosultatioun at ony sic usaris or abusaris foirsaidis of Witchcraftis, Sorsareis or Necromancie, under the pane of deid, alsweill to be execute aganis the usar, abusar, as the seikar of the response or consultatioun.

The experience of Watchman Nee (Ni Tuosheng) and the Christian Assembly (Jidutu juhuichu or Jidutu juhuisuo) in Mainland China after the Communist Revolution of 1949 reveals the complexity of church and state relations in the early 1950s. Widely known in the West as the Little Flock (Xiaoqun), the Christian Assembly, founded by Watchman Nee, was one of the fastest growing native Protestant movements in China during the early twentieth century. It was not created by a foreign missionary enterprise. Nor was it based on the Anglo-American Protestant denominational model. And its rapid development fitted well with an indigenous development called the Three-Self Movement, in which Chinese Christians created self-supporting, selfgoverning, and self-propagating churches. But it did not share the highly politicized anti-imperialist rhetoric of another Three-Self Movement, the Communist-initiated “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” (sanzi aiguo yundong): self-rule autonomous from foreign missionary and imperialist control, financial self-support without foreign donations, and self-preaching independent of any Christian missionary influences. As the overarching organization of the one-party state, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement sought to ensure that all Chinese Protestant congregations would submit to the socialist ideology.

When President Bill Clinton testified before a Grand Jury hearing on August 17, 1998 that he “did not have sexual intercourse with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” the American public learned at least two important lessons. First, the definition of sex was debatable and second, the authority to define sex as sexual intercourse was the crucial factor in the meaning of that pesky verb “is.” The questions of what is sex and, more importantly, who defines it have been studied and discussed thoroughly by scholars of U.S. history and culture. In American popular culture the social scientific findings published in the Kinsey Reports (1948, 1953) and William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson's Human Sexual Response (1966) provided information (or “scientific facts”) for lay people regarding the diversity and possibility of human sexual expression: what sex “is.” The growing awareness since the late 1950s that sex is more than one specific act has led many people to question whether sex as we learn it from our parents, teachers, clergy, friends, books, and science is “natural” (a matter of biological response) or socially constructed (a matter of cultural control). Opinions vary, tempers flare, and the mountain of sex advice manuals available at local bookstores attests to the U.S. public's insatiable appetite for knowledge about sex.