Includes bibliographical references (p. 303-324) and index.

Introduction and overview -- Roman patriarchy : entering the darkness -- Why Rome? Why now? -- Roman patriarchy and violence -- Vergil on the darkness visible -- Apuleius on conversion -- Augustine on conversion -- Resistance across time and culture -- Resistance : religion -- The historical Jesus -- The Jews and Christian anti-semitism -- The argument for toleration -- Christian resistance : Bayle and Locke -- Jewish resistance : Spinoza -- Ethical religion and constitutional rights -- Radical abolitionism -- Martin Luther King, Jr. -- Religion and the values of constitutional democracy -- The legacy of celibacy -- The priest sexual abuse scandal -- James Carroll on resistance to war and to anti-semitism -- Resistance : psychology -- Freud's opening and closing to women -- The alternative psychology of Ian D. Suttie -- The lens of gender -- Resistance : the artists -- Why art? -- Hemingway's A farewell to arms -- Joyce's Ulysses -- Wharton's Age of innocence -- Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, To the lighthouse, and Three guineas -- Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's lover -- Resistance : politics -- Between patriarchy and democracy : contradictions in American constitutionalism -- The psychological roots of fascism and the rebirth of democratic constitutionalism -- Irrational prejudice : anti-semitism as the model for racism, sexism, and homophobia -- The resistance movements of the 1960s and later -- Resistance to fundamentalism in American constitutional law -- Democracy's future -- The contemporary scene -- Impact of western colonialism in Asia and the Middle East -- The war on terror -- Sexual voice and the interpretation of the 1960s.