Gender, Power, Privilege: Unavoidable Impolite Questions about the Catholic Conversation in the Public Square

In a posting I made earlier this morning about the compromise the Obama administration has offered the U.S. Catholic bishops re: contraceptive coverage, I ended by noting Joan Walsh’s outstanding analysis of what has taken place in the intra-Catholic debate lately. I noted that Joan Walsh sees a new maturity in what has been a tribalistic American Catholicism whose public voice has been almost exclusively dominated by men.  She notes that, in recent debates about the contraceptive guidelines, the voices of women–Catholic women included–are beginning to be heard with new force.  

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Conservative Catholic and Evangelical Preoccupation with Gender, and Ironic Subversion of Gender-Based Orthodoxies

His Eminence Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura

Jim McCrea has forwarded a group of his e-friends an interesting essay by a blogger who calls herself Pentimento, and who writes at the Vox Nova site about the sola skirtura controversy now swirling around in certain Catholic circles.  (And who knew?  Who knew that a half century after Vatican II called us to creative dialectic engagement with secular culture, the portentous issue on some American Catholic plates AD 2011 would be to assure that Catholic women wear the kind of skirts Our Blessed Mother used to wear?

Robert McClory on Danger of Turning Metaphor Into Law

I’ve long contended that one of the most pernicious confusions that religious believers with a fundamentalist bent introduce into public discourse about religious issues is this: they take what is metaphorical, and they try to freeze the metaphor.  To absolutize it.  To make the analogical into a litmus test of absolute truth rather than a metaphor pointing in imperfect, halting human language to what transcends language.

“The father who was milked”: A gender-rich Trinity from the 2nd century.

Sometimes, I come across an idea or image that is so remarkable, so fresh and new (to me) that it just has to be shared. This one is hardly new (it dates back to the late second century), but it is startlingly fresh, remarkable and new – to me.

Wall painting from a Syrian house church, showing the healing of the paralysed man.

I have been researching a number of themes from the history of the early church. While reading Ivor Davidson’s “The Birth of the Church: From Jesus to Constantine AD 30 -312”, I came across a passage which had nothing to do with the subject(s) I was investigating, but which I want to spread.

The context is a Chapter on Christian worship. After some discussion of the regular practice of community Eucharist on Sunday morning and Agape (“love feast”) on Sunday evening, he goes on to discuss the practice of regular fasting, prayer and praise. Services of “praise” incorporated psalms and hymns of praise into other Bible readings, as in the Divine Office. Davidson then goes on to refer to a less familiar from of praise for worship, lost for centuries and rediscovered in the beginning of the 20 th Century. Originating in the church of Easter Syria, these are Gnostic in flavour, but probably orthodox in origin. The extract quoted, from Ode 19, introduces an exaltation on the original conception. Davidson says the odes contain some “striking” language. The imagery of the Trinity as presented here, in its description of the conception of the Son, is not just “striking”: it slams one across the face with a force sufficient to shake up one’s brain, and with it all preconceived ideas of Trinity, and also of God and gender.

I present it here without comment: see what you think: