of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reviewed the book for The Catholic Historical Review alongside John W. Baldwin's The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France Around 1200. Briefly dismissing Boswell's work as unsuccessful at placing his interpretations within the "customs, language, and theology" of the time, he urges the reader to read Shaw's review in The New Republic. Traditio, the publication of the Jesuit Fordham University in New York, produced a special issues dedicated to responding to Boswell's claims. Wider reception By July 1994, the book had gone through four printings and sold 31,000 copies, something far in excess of most works on medieval history. General media reviewing the book in 1994–95 included The New Yorker, The Economist, People Weekly, The Spectator, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, The New Republic, the New Statesman & Society, The New York Times, and Newsweek. The book was also widely reviewed within Christian media in the United States. Writing in The Christian Century magazine, the historical theologian Philip Lyndon Reynolds expressed "profound problems" with Boswell's positions, which he claims rest largely on "ambiguity and equivocation" and "conceptual slipperiness". He is particularly critical of Boswell's use of "same-sex unions" as a translation of terms like adelphopoiesis, believing that this was an "ill-chosen and dangerously slippery term" because it has been widely interpreted in the media as an innuendo for "gay marriage" and therefore lacks neutrality. He also rejects Boswell's argument that the same-sex ceremonies were found in Western Christianity as well as Eastern Christianity, stating that the "heterogeneous bits of evidence" assembled to argue for this position were insufficient. Reynolds wrote: On her Christian apologetics website, the American Roman Catholic journalist Marian Therese Horvat pejoratively accused Boswell of being a historical revisionist, claiming that his book was "obviously shaped by his personal lifestyle and convictions", having been written to "further the gay rights agenda". Maintaining that all of the church blessings between two men described in the book were ceremonies of "spiritual brotherhood" and not of "same-sex unions", she highlighted the law codes that prohibited same-sex sexual activity during this period, information she claims Boswell ignored. Labelling Same-Sex Unions as "bad history", she attacked it as a threat to "the very soul of Christian Civilization." Subsequent scholarship In 2003, The Friend by the scholar Alan Bray