150 years ago, a French-Jewish teenager told his father, a rabbi in the town of Épinal, that he had decided against entering rabbinical school, thus breaking with a family tradition that stretched ...

Why was it often difficult, in the late medieval religious world, to draw the line between saints and demoniacs? This article argues that the question—which goes to the core of the social construction ...

If I wanted to be controversial, as a sociologist, I might say that serial murder is “functional” for society. However, a less inflammatory way to say the same thing is that serial murder can be ...