Jean Bethke Elshtain: Gifted Scholar and Courageous Woman

Public Discourse today posted my tribute to Jean Bethke Elshtain, whom the world lost earlier this week.  Here are a couple of paragraphs.

"Late in her life, Jean “pulled the trigger” on a decision she had been contemplating for many years: she followed the path of her great Lutheran friend Richard John Neuhaus into full communion with the Catholic Church. Like Fr. Neuhaus, she believed that Lutheranism had accomplished its mission of reforming the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” There was, in her view, as in his, no longer a need or a justification to remain a Protestant. So she was received into the Catholic Church by another of her dear friends—a fellow polio victim—Cardinal Francis George of Chicago. Present at the service as a witness was yet another of her dearest friends, Professor Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School—someone she always referred to as “my sister in solidarity.”

"Of course, the larger “sisterhood” of 1970s feminists and “gender studies” types (and the Left more generally) had disowned Jean long before her conversion to Catholicism—which did nothing but please her. She refused to go along with abortion, sexual “liberation,” redefining marriage, or many of their other causes. The contemporary writer on women and femininity whom she most admired was . . . Pope John Paul II. She made it a point to include his writings on the syllabus whenever questions of gender were addressed in her courses. Readers can easily imagine how many friends that made her in the Gender Studies department."

The entire tribute is here:  http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/08/10760/