Things I have been up to:

Last weekend - the Edith Stein conference, in Notre Dame. My sis and I were among the few out-of-town attendees, but I'm sure that next year the conference will attract more attention. The topic of the conference was redefining feminism in accordance with JP II's call for a new feminism. The speakers were on the whole quite good, although there was a bit of preaching to the choir re: abortion/contraception/pornography. I think it's a safe bet that people attending a conference about Edith Stein are probably aware that pr0n is teh bad for women.

Things that I enjoyed hearing pointed out:

• Lay women who are mothers now have the ability to contribute to philosophy and theology, and in so doing could give an unprecedented insight into many issues. Elizabeth Anscombe is probably the foremost example of this.


• Those who are against higher education for women, inasmuch as such higher education does not directly prepare women for baby-making/caring (and there are some Catholics, men and women, who hold this opinion) implicitly consider childcare a purely material endeavour. If, really, taking care of kids involves only changing their diapers and putting food in their mouths, then yeah, arguably, the education or lack thereof on the part of the mother wouldn't matter a bit. However, being a mother to children involves not just nourishing their bodies, but also cultivating their souls. The more well rounded your education has been, the more you are able to transmit to your kidlings a love of the true, good, and beautiful. True education is never a waste, even if you do go ahead and spend your life homeschooling children.

Things I wish were addressed (but weren't):

• I was baffled when many of the speakers made reference to women's loss of dignity in our day and age/culture. Sure, contraception, pornography, and abortion all rob women of dignity. However, do women as a whole have less dignity now then they did at any other point in the history of the West? No one made any arguments to that effect.


• Pope John Paul II is not the only feminist. I would have loved to hear a treatment of the feminist movement, per se, especially on what good can be brought out of early feminist thought.


• It seems to me that the Church has done much to reverse the Greco-Roman view of women as beautiful but better kept in the background (just as the Church worked against slavery and infant exposure and other social ills). However, the Church still existed in a culture which had a seriously warped view of women. This definitely had some effect (e.g. Tertullian calling women the "gateways of hell"). I would be interested in seeing a history of the evolution of the Church's thought on the role of women, written from the perspective of a non-lunatic.