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Although Gladstone never abandoned his attachment to Christian dogma, he developed distinctly Broad Church sympathies in his later years. One reason for this evolution of his views was a reaction against the rigid state confessionalism of the earlier period. Another was his strong hostility to the claims of the Roman Catholic Church, which he believed to be a threat to liberty, even though he listened appreciatively to the views of more progressive voices within the Roman communion, especially that of Ignaz von Döllinger. A third reason consisted of his preoccupation with ecumenical relations so that the churches could present a united front against infidelity. His personal crisis of 1850-51, forcing him back on basic beliefs, was a fourth reason. The result was a fresh appreciation of the humanity of Jesus that provided a sanction for compassion with the suffering.

Gladstone waged a campaign against infidelity in his later years. He was unwilling to take up the ground of the Roman Catholic Church of intransigent resistance to modern thought, contending instead that the concurrence of all Christians in certain central doctrines was presumptive evidence of their truth. At the Metaphysical Society Gladstone debated the authority for matters of faith with early agnostics. He engaged in literary exchanges with T. H. Huxley, the champion of Victorian scientific naturalism, with Gladstone vainly attempting to vindicate the sequence of creation as recounted in Genesis by means of modern science. The politician then tried to steady public opinion against the notion that higher criticism had undermined the Bible in The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture (1890). After his retirement, Gladstone published an edition of the works of Bishop Butler to illustrate the method to be adopted in Christian apologetic.

Saudi Arabia has perhaps the broadest blasphemy and apostasy prohibitions. The government uses its position as custodian of Islam's two holiest shrines, Mecca and Medina, to assert that its Wahhabi interpretation of the faith is the authoritative one. Effectively, this means that Muslims of different views, whether Shias, Sufis, reformers or political dissidents, may be condemned as apostates. For example, the opening fatwa of a government educational pamphlet rebukes a European imam for his “infidelity” because he “casts doubts about the infidelity of Jews and Christians.” This is a serious charge since, according to the country's textbooks, it is permissible to kill someone for infidelity, though within the Kingdom, prison terms and flogging are more likely. Saudi Arabia's Shia minority, including Ismailis, suffer disproportionately for blasphemy offenses. Among those in the Sunni majority Sunni convicted in recent years were democracy activists, imprisoned for using “unIslamic” terminology, such as “democracy” and “human rights.” Among those given prison terms and lashes for “mocking religion” were teachers who discussed the Bible in class and made favorable comments about Jews, or who maintained that the dominance of radical Islamists over Saudi university culture had harmed the quality of programs.

The concluding chapter offers an alternate and parallel history of listening to the other in modernity through an examination of recordings made of and by Zora Neale Hurston in various recording expeditions between 1935 and 1939. This contrapuntal Epilogue focuses on recordings that offer an alternative listening relation to the one chronicled in the other five chapters, one that is as firmly rooted within modernity but refuses the social structuration and symbolic formations mapped in the WMCI. This concluding chapter presents a different origin story of recording than the one chronicled in the book, offering the starting point for a liberationist genealogy that the book wishes for.

This chapter examines the lives of the “victory girls” of World War II—young women who exhibited patriotism by offering sex to servicemen. This relationship defied not only social norms but also the authorities that attempted to classify, manage, and restrain young people's sexual acts and attitudes. World War II left a legacy of young female sexual self-assertion that would generate both conservative and liberal responses in the postwar years, inspiring calls for female sexual autonomy during the “sexual revolution” to come. The stories examined in the chapter illustrate how the nation's military mobilization expanded young women's access to casual encounters. It also discusses the issues that emerged such as infidelity, rape, and the rise of sexually transmitted diseases.

This chapter discusses the therapeutic process for a couple involved with infidelity. Infidelity is a violation of the contract between spouses that specifies exclusivity of the relationship. It is an element of instability brought into the system, sometimes with the purpose of stabilizing it. The chapter describes the prevalence of infidelity and classifies it into three types: sexual, emotional, and virtual. The system protects itself against infidelity by using several measures, one of which is the marital contract and religiosity. Most couples who come to therapy want to end the crisis, restore the relationship, and make sure it will not happen again. The chapter further discusses the ground rules and process of the therapy for couples who struggle with infidelity.

This chapter indicates a shift in morality regarding sex among eastern European Jews, and the new role played by radical intellectuals as moral arbiters, as illustrated via a letter to Kalman Marmor, a prolific cultural historian and educator in the Communist movement. This letter inquires after a variety of topics regarding marriage and infidelity, as contextualized within a Communist viewpoint. It briefly touches upon the broader subjects of marriage and sex, before turning to its finer points: infidelity, extramarital sex, and the disclosure of such intimate information to outside parties. Furthermore, the letter notably frames these inquiries in the context of morality.

Provocation privileges homicidal fury. It allows certain persons who kill in that state to be convicted of culpable homicide rather than murder. It does not do this overtly and it does not, in theory, exclude those who kill under the influence of other extreme emotions, but the conditions of the defence still lend themselves to a response of excessive anger to the initial provoking act. It has not been particularly problematic operationally in Scots law but this is because its scope is extremely limited rather than because it works well in identifying circumstances in which the accused truly deserves to be partially excused. This chapter argues that, to be fit for purpose in a twenty-first-century society, provocation cannot escape reform. It considers the influence of its historical development, from its roots as a form of excessive self-defence, and the lack of clarity in the law to which this led in the early part of the twentieth century. It argues that it is no longer appropriate to limit the entry points into the defence — the provoking acts — to the historically contingent behaviours of violence and the discovery of sexual infidelity.

Postwar Americans concurrently supported marriage as the cornerstone of personal fulfillment and believed it to be in crisis. They endorsed the institution in unprecedented numbers, as the vast majority of the population chose wedlock over single life, and marriage became increasingly central to national ideology. Kinsey's studies reported that less than half of Americans' sexual activity took place between spouses, and observers imparted the prevalence and devastating effects of premarital sex, infidelity, divorce, and other ills. The marital relationship meant many things to postwar observers. At a moment of intense pronatalism, it was the necessary setting for the birth and rearing of legitimate children. Generally understood as an intensely private realm based on an emotional bond between unique individuals, marriage promised personal happiness and fulfillment. In addition, it was the central, and to some the only, proper setting for sexual expression.

This chapter discusses the breakup of the author and Lan Jun. It explains that Lan Jun told the author that he wanted to find himself again and concentrate on his art. Lan Jun explained that he did not need the author anymore and that he was suffering from humiliation below the hips. The following day the author's friend accidentally discovered that Lan Jun had already been going out with another woman for more than six months.

Death was not only a structural principle for Jacques Derrida. There is a double difficulty in attempting to do justice to Emmanuel Levinas's work on responsibility to the other. Derrida's long essay on Levinas was at once generous in drawing attention to the importance of Levinas's work and exacting in its critique of some of that work's central claims and methods. Derrida's later essay showed his fidelity to Levinas through infidelity, by means of a careful and respectful questioning of the older writer's mode of argumentation and his privileging of the masculine. Derrida's conviction that the third arrives without waiting and thus forestalls the violence of the other signals both his fidelity to his dead friend's thought and, as itself a mark of the third complicating that relation, his willingness to let it be remade by his own inventiveness – though Derrida, of course, does not put it in this way.