Last summer, we adopted a little girl who'd been fostered by a deeply evangelical couple, "called" to minister to children in China. I'm more accustomed to mocking the faithful than to thanking them, and I'm not good at hypocrisy. I picked up The Case for God looking for a reason to change.

I had a purely secular education, and except for a brief flirtation with the Christianity of Amy Grant (I'm so ashamed), I've never left the atheist fold in which I was raised. I had to respect the way Rory's foster parents acted on their religious convictions—who wouldn't?—but in my mind, evangelical Christians were those who "blindly accepted that 'Jesus could be eaten in the form of a cracker.' " My effort to reconcile those two ideas led me to The Case for God. Karen Armstrong, once a nun and now a TED prizewinner, argues that it is the actions, rather than the doctrine, that have constituted "religion" for most of its history, and she effectively let me off the hook. If what people do with their religion (rather than what they say about it) is "God," then that's a God I can believe in.

The Case for God is a massive book, covering the history of the major religions and their varying descents into fundamentalism and including a thorough investigation into philosophy. I liked it. But in my mind it's misleadingly titled—I'd call it The Case for God (Kinda). Armstrong's God is not the "God" that Richard Dawkins et al. protest, nor one that most people would recognize as such. She takes religion back to a time when examination, not faith, was its purpose, and the God she defends can't be argued with because, in a sense, her God is argument itself. She makes a case, not for "God," but for the kind of examined life that a search for God delivers. "Why is there something, and not nothing?" The answer, for Armstrong, isn't God. But the question is. Which makes "The Case for God" that rare (maybe singular) book that lets you argue with your atheist cousin AND your fundamentalist aunt—or just reconcile your affection for the two.

DoubleX is starting a new partnership with The Washington Post Magazine. Each week our contributors will argue over a certain question, and we invite you to join in. This week: A recent Census report refutes the idea that large numbers of women are quitting successful careers to become stay-at-home moms.

Hanna Rosin: So the latest census data shows that there is no "opt-out revolution," meaning that middle-class women are not actually dropping out of the workplace in droves. We seem to have exaggerated the phenomenon based on thin anecdotal evidence, as we seem to always exaggerate the agonies of the middle class. (Barbara Ehrenreich diagnosed this problem first in her book Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class.) My guess is that what’s changed is not the habits of women but their attitudes. It’s not that fewer women work, it's that there is a self-consciousness about not working, and women who choose not to work stand out as a more noticeable subculture. The hope is that one day either decision brings a shrug, and maybe working and non-working moms can even be friends!

Emily Bazelon: Hanna, my own take is that there is a small rise, since 1994, in the percentage of families with kids under 15 with a stay-at-home mother. But the rise isn't among the highly educated, affluent women whom the fuss was all about. They are not the stay-at-home mom norm. And yet we all know them, and I suppose you're right about the subculture, though I get a little historical whiplash trying to think about how exactly this is different than the PTA moms of previous generations. In any case, I've never believed in the sharp working/not-working divide. It's much more of a spectrum, with women who can afford to moving in and out of working more or less, full-time or part-time, and talking it through with women making different choices as they go. Sure, there's some alienation and judging along the way. But in my experience there's also more common ground than we usually get credit for.

Rachael Larimore: Talk about "opting-out" and the entire "mommy wars" meme invariably implies that a woman must work 40 hours a week or stay at home. Yet I know so many moms who have made career choices that allow them to have the best of both worlds, or at least try to. Moms who work part-time, moms who own their own businesses and limit their time away from home, moms who (like me) telecommute. Far too much attention is given to the divisiveness of the "mommy wars" and not enough is given to the fact that women today are working hard and finding creative ways to get the intellectual fulfillment that a job provides while still being attentive parents.

Amanda Marcotte: The opt-out revolution is a myth no matter what definition of the word you work with. In the colloquial sense, the word "myth" is used to mean a popular fiction that a number of people believe is true, but is not. In that sense, the opt-out revolution is indeed a myth, because while a number of people believed there was a stampede of middle to upper middle class women out of the job and into the home, recently released Census data proves this isn't so. But the opt-out revolution is also a myth in the older sense of the word: a story in which veracity is less important than normative qualities. From the beginning, the opt-out revolution was a myth that was less about describing a current reality than about creating pressure on women to either create that reality by quitting their jobs, or at least feel very guilty if they'd rather be checking in at the office than putting on an apron and cooking a pot roast for a breadwinner husband. That's why I don't see it going away, even in the face of lack of evidence for any trend. Like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, the opt-out housewife is too tempting as a cudgel to bully women who reject old-fashioned femininity for independence.

KJ Dell'Antonia: Honestly? I live at the corner of Opt-out Road and Lisa Belkin Lane. Small town, Ivy college, and a totally atypical number of female graduates of that college and institutes of even higher learning staying home and raising kids. If you lived here, you'd put the whole thing on the cover of a magazine, too—but that's exactly what was wrong with the idea of the opt-out revolution. Almost nobody lives here, literally or in metaphor. It's only if you do—and I'd argue that a relatively high percentage of editors, writers, and readers are part of a community like mine in some way—that it seems significant. Plus, they called it too soon. A lot of those so-called "opt-out" women go back, one way or another.

Tags: opting out

In the past week, the Today Show has done lengthy segments on two women scorned: Ali Wise, the former Dolce & Gabbana flack who hacked into her ex-boyfriend's voice mail account, and the even more psychotic former ESPN production assistant Brooke Hundley, who harrassed the wife and children of her ex-lover, ESPN analyst Steve Phillips. Both the tales had sexy, new-media twists, Wise with her voice-mail hacking and Hundley because she bothered Phillips's son on Facebook.

Wise is more of a garden-variety loon, or as Gawker's Hamilton Nolan puts it, "The most fascinating thing about Ali Wise's craziness is its very pedestrian nature—pedestrian on crystal meth, maybe, but still." Brooke Hundley went much further. According to the New York Post, "Hundley drove to the Phillips' home, where she dropped off the frightening letter before speeding off when she Marni arrived, hitting a stone post on the way out." The Post printed the letter, and Hundley rags on Phillips's wife for being a stay-at-home-mom in the most demented way possible: "While he's glad you decided to stay home," Hundley writes, "he enjoys being with me because I have more of a passion and drive to really do something with my life."

I wonder if these Fatal Attraction-ish cautionary stories—the pitting of terrifying career woman against sanity and family—are all the rage these days for a reason that Janet Maslin puts forth in her review of that film from 1987. They are part of the national hangover from a gilded age:

Years hence, it will be possible to pinpoint the exact moment that produced ''Fatal Attraction,'' Adrian Lyne's new romantic thriller, and the precise circumstances that made it a hit. It arrived at the tail end of the having-it-all age, just before the impact of AIDS on movie morality was really felt. At the same time, it was a powerful cautionary tale. And it played skillfully upon a growing societal emphasis on marriage and family, shrewdly offering something for everyone: the desperation of an unmarried career woman, the recklessness of a supposedly satisfied husband, the worries of a betrayed wife. What's more, it was made with the slick, seductive professionalism that was a hallmark of the day.

We just left another age of recklessness, financial and moral. Are these women Glenn Closes of the Internet age?

Tags: ali wise, brooke hundley, dolce and gabbana, espn, fatal attraction, Gawker, glenn close, hamilton nolan, steve phillips

Natasha Vargas-Cooper delves into the universe of Twlight fan-fiction, where Bella and Edward generally exchange more than longing looks. We get some heavy breathing, a desperate "fuck me, Edward," and if not bodice-ripping, definitely thong-ripping. Someone has a thing for twins, so Edward gets cloned. The question arises: How far can one stray from Stephanie Meyer's world and still keep fans excited? I thought this exchange was interesting:

I asked Becca if she thinks the older readers and writers of Twilighted are scandalized by it.

“No,” Becca said. “It’s the teenagers. They ruin it. Younger readers want you to stick the story. The moms and older set of Twilighted are more sexually adventurous.”

Tags: fanfic, pornography, twilight

Lars Von Trier's Antichrist, starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe as a couple grieving the death of an infant son who tumbled to his death while mommy and daddy were having hot sex, has been piously lambasted as "misogynist" by male critics ever since it premiered at last May’s Cannes Film Festival. Before I had a chance to see it, a male reporter for a major newspaper told me that "no woman" could possibly enjoy the film.

I’m sure he meant this as a critique of Antichrist’s graphic sexual violence (mostly notably male and female genital mutilation, both performed by Gainsbourg’s unnamed “gynocide” researcher), and not as a critique of us hypersensitive womenfolk’s inability to read allegory, but after I saw the film a few days later, it was hard not to take offense at the reflexive gender assumption. What can I say? I enjoyed Antichrist. I guess this makes me less of a woman?

Von Trier has carefully calibrated his auteur terrible persona so that most of the criticisms his work inspires seem to play directly into his hands. In the case of Antichrist, he’s playfully stoked the misogyny fire by billing one of his collaborators, Danish journalist Heidi Laura, as the film's "misogyny consultant." But anyone who takes the time to grapple with what Von Trier has put on screen should find a film that’s far too complex to be dismissed as merely sexist. Von Trier seems to engaging with, inverting, and/or subverting the whole of horror movie history, from the function of the woods in earlier talkies like Frankenstein, to wartime allegories like Cat People, in which woman is an exotic beast who must be spayed or slayed, to Carol Clover’s "final girl" theory of the slasher films of the 1980s, in which the last woman left alive is transformed from victim to hero.

Von Trier’s heroine takes the opposite route—she transforms from victim to perpetrator—but her crimes, though born from sexual hysteria, aren’t unjustifiable. Von Trier goes out of his way to depict Dafoe as an unbearably condescending scold who privileges his own professional success to his wife’s while depriving her of basic physical comforts. In classic horror movie formula, desire repressed always comes back as vengeance, and Antichrist defies any viewer with a feel for that formula to not, on some level, get excited by the woman’s revenge.

In fact, I’d argue that Antichrist is a much better—and scarier, and more sexually and politically provocative—female revenge film than Jennifer’s Body, which some writers have claimed as a work of feminism. Just as many of the more positive writings on that Diablo Cody film defend the screenwriter against what is seen as her unfair persecution, a lot of the most negative writings on Antichrist apply a superficial, knee-jerk reading to an incredibly complicated film, in order to get to the conclusion that it's not safe for viewing by anyone, but particularly women. I wonder how the common effort to protect all of us delicate female flowers—whether from the ego-bruising of criticism or the potential psychological damage of bearing witness to a movie clitorectomy—doesn't qualify as its own kind of misogyny.

Maybe we should all take a cue from the one demographic that has unapologetically embraced Antichrist: the fanboys, who have turned the warning growled in the film by a disemboweled fox ("Chaos Reigns!") into a T-shirt slogan and all-purpose battle cry. The dateless, basement-dwelling stereotype of the fanboy aside, young male horror fans aren’t going to let the kind of fear of women that leads to politically correct tiptoeing get in the way of their good time. And neither should we.

(Slate has more on whether or not Lars Von Trier is a misogynist.)

Tags: antichrist, carol clover, cat people, diablo cody, frankenstein, heidi laura, jennifer's body, lars von trier, misogyny consultant