PHALLUS AND VAGINA. The historical religious traditions and the modern critical study of religion share at least one thing in common: they both display an abiding fascination with the sexual organs and their power to shape religious language, social life, human thought, and the experience of the sacred itself. Historically speaking, both this history and this modern study have been controlled largely by male actors, that is, by human beings with penises, and so these discourses have tended to be phallic discourses that implicitly or explicitly erase, ignore, or simply deny the vagina, whose internal and external anatomy, sexual function, and means of arousal male actors have seldom, if ever, really understood. This situation, however, has changed dramatically since the 1960s. As women and female perspectives have increasingly entered the center of the study of religion and enriched, deepened, and complicated our understandings, the...