By way of introduction...

It is a real honor to have been invited to 'blog' here at Mirror of Justice.  I have long admired the keen observations about all things Catholic and legal on this blog, and am so grateful it exists. I do not know how well I'll take to blogging, but if there is a blog for me, this is the one. Thank you Rick and Lisa for taking a chance on me. 

It is particularly edifying to have been invited to join a 'law professor' blog without, well, being a law professor. It gives some credence to the view that my scholarly work is actually important to someone out there; it's not just something I do to keep myself intellectually engaged when I am not otherwise active with six young children or with the classical Catholic school I just helped to found outside of Boston:  www.stbenedictelementary.com.  

My work involves the development of a thoroughgoing Catholic feminist theory as well as a Catholic feminist legal theory, especially as questions about gender intersect with questions of sexual and social ethics.  (I'm also quite interested and adept in discussing theories of both education/educational policy and religious liberty, but will also readily admit to expertise in neither.)

I entered the feminist conversation 20 yrs ago, as a secular feminist activist and Women’s Studies student during my early years at Middlebury College in Vermont.  Since my conversion (or ‘reversion’) to Catholicism in my final year at Middlebury in 1996 (a drama that involves the intellectual intervention of a leading Staussian atheist Jew), I’ve been keenly aware that, to be taken seriously in the modern world, the Church has to be in serious conversation with secular feminists. And though I tend to like a debate, and am strident in my arguments, I do mean conversation. Our political discourse—what with recent War on Women rhetoric on the left and a real demonization of feminism on the right—hasn’t served us well on this score. While adhominems fly, opportunity for real conversation among those of who see ourselves working for women’s progress remains barren. (NB: I applaud the work of Lisa Schiltz and Susan Stabile, especially in their most recent book in search of common ground with Georgetown law professor Robin West, about which I hope to write in a future post.)

So what I’ve tried to do in my work as legal scholar and women’s advocate is something not many faithful Catholic intellectuals would really ever care to do, but is something that is increasingly necessary if we are to truly engage secular feminism on its own terms: as a good student of Strauss, I seek to read the leading feminist philosophical and legal literature with a sympathetic eye; having been on board once upon a time, I find such sympathy easy to come by (and often still agree with and enjoy much of what I read). 

As I write in Mary Rice Hasson's new book, Promise and Challenge (mentioned by Lisa in an earlier post): 

In order to advance successfully a new feminist worldview in public life or in scholarship, we have to take the time to listen to our feminist-minded interlocutors, read them, and get to know them. If we are convinced, with St. Thomas, that human beings seek the good and the truth, we can turn to feminist theory and argument, and make an effort to identify the good intentions, insights, and authentic advances. In order to love them, we must take them seriously and sympathize with their position the best we can. We must have the confidence to ask humbly what we can learn from our interlocutors. What is it that makes their viewpoint, their writings, so compelling to others? Listening to them can teach us much—about their presuppositions first and foremost, and about potential areas of agreement. In general, though of course there are myriad exceptions, feminist-minded scholars and lay persons tend to care deeply about the sorts of things Catholic women care about:  women and children, relationships, and the vulnerable. We just have starkly different ways of addressing these shared concerns.

I believe that the Church offers a richly pro-woman alternative to secular feminism, but that alternative is deeply inaccessible to the many many people who look out at the world through a secular feminist prism.   As I write in Promise and Challenge:  

Part of our current trouble making inroads into the culture with the Church’s extraordinarily liberating pro-woman message is our inability to translate it adequately for the modern world. (And Pope Francis does seem to think the trouble lay primarily with us, Christ’s disciples, and not with the lost sheep who no longer heed the Christian message.)...To the “JPII Catholic,” guided by the light of faith and strengthened by sacramental grace, the Church’s sexual teachings seem so right and life-saving, and so good for marriage, children, men and women—that there could be no other way. As a result, a vast gulf exists between the well-formed Catholic and the world’s sojourner, a sojourner who has been deeply formed, on the other hand, by the secular feminist worldview, whether or not she knows it or would even describe herself as a feminist. Key phrases used by John Paul II, such as “sexual complementarity,” “feminine, or nurturing, nature,” or “the nuptial meaning of the body” may mean gift and purpose to the well-formed Catholic but represent oppression and confinement to the feminist-minded. Just as in the days of the early Church, members of the same family speak as though foreigners, lacking not only a common moral framework, but also a common language. If we do not find a new translation, a mediating bridge that better articulates Church teaching in a world shaped by feminist views, we will remain forever a booming gong and clashing cymbal, a self-referential church, the Pope says, that thinks itself better than the world, but meanwhile shrivels in its pride, in its inability to love the other enough to go out and find her.

The rest of that chapter as well as the whole of Women, Sex & the Church: A Case for Catholic Teaching tries to make some progress in articulating Church teachings anew, not for utilitarian purposes as though to spin her unpopular teachings in a more attractive way, but alas, because they are true. The sexual revolution has not been the boon to women secular feminists seem to think.