How women image God and the concept of “divine femininity” are huge topics that deserve a lot more attention. I really enjoyed this presentation and I’d love to know if you have published any written work on this, or if you know of any good sources where I could learn more. This is actually an area that I’ve been struggling a lot with recently. Both men and women being made in the image and likeness of God is a key idea in the Christian understanding of humanity (it’s in the first chapter of Genesis), but women being in the image of God in particular is not only de-emphasized, but is often actively dismissed. Paragraphs 239 and 370 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church are very interesting to me on this topic. This also reminded me of an article I read on Substack a while back:
I totally agree. Unfortunately, what inspired me to delve into this topic was the realization that everything I read on gender difference from Christians implicitly or explicitly claimed that women are less in the image of God than men. I, obviously, had read stuff in Julian of Norwich and Catherine of Siena, but that was about it. The theological arguments about bride and victim I made up, and have thus far not found others who have connected the metaphysics to gender in this way.
I know there is more on this in the tradition of feminist theology from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but have yet to delve into it. I have 'Beyond God the Father' by Mary Daly on my shelf, though, so hopefully we will have an episode on that in the future. I have some notions about doing a series for the podcast on the feminist theologians we (i.e., those being instructed in pious milieu of Catholicism) were told not to read because for orthodoxy reasons, but I want to suss out how much of it is actually heterodox and if the problematic aspects are really inseparable from other feminist claims vis-a-vis of divine nature. If you have any suggestions, definitely let us know.
“Beyond God the Father” sounds really interesting! I’ll definitely have to search for literature on these topics as well. I’ve also gotten the feeling from a lot of people in the Christian space that certain works shouldn’t be read for reasons of orthodoxy, especially on this topic. However, at a certain point, I think it becomes frustrating when others assume that you don’t have the ability to sift the wheat from the chaff. Especially because writers that we would otherwise consider orthodox, like Aquinas, could express ideas that were wrong or highly problematic, including his understanding of women (as influenced by Aristotle). So on one end we might error in rejecting everything an unorthodox author says including some of the good ideas they have, and on the other end, we could blindly accept everything a saint says without subjecting that to the greater tradition and believe wrong ideas. I’m all for taking a higher level of scrutiny into certain works and authors because their ideas might be corrupted to a problematic degree. And I don’t share seriously difficult or problematic works with people who I don’t think are mature or knowledgeable enough to handle the sifting. But I feel like there is something about this topic in particular that we might actually have to get outside of typical sources to learn more.
Thank you so much for uploading this talk! It gave me so much to think about!
Glad you liked it!
How women image God and the concept of “divine femininity” are huge topics that deserve a lot more attention. I really enjoyed this presentation and I’d love to know if you have published any written work on this, or if you know of any good sources where I could learn more. This is actually an area that I’ve been struggling a lot with recently. Both men and women being made in the image and likeness of God is a key idea in the Christian understanding of humanity (it’s in the first chapter of Genesis), but women being in the image of God in particular is not only de-emphasized, but is often actively dismissed. Paragraphs 239 and 370 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church are very interesting to me on this topic. This also reminded me of an article I read on Substack a while back:
https://thecatholicfeminist.substack.com/p/the-femininity-of-god
And this one:
https://thecatholicfeminist.substack.com/p/daring-to-call-god-mother-346
I totally agree. Unfortunately, what inspired me to delve into this topic was the realization that everything I read on gender difference from Christians implicitly or explicitly claimed that women are less in the image of God than men. I, obviously, had read stuff in Julian of Norwich and Catherine of Siena, but that was about it. The theological arguments about bride and victim I made up, and have thus far not found others who have connected the metaphysics to gender in this way.
I know there is more on this in the tradition of feminist theology from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but have yet to delve into it. I have 'Beyond God the Father' by Mary Daly on my shelf, though, so hopefully we will have an episode on that in the future. I have some notions about doing a series for the podcast on the feminist theologians we (i.e., those being instructed in pious milieu of Catholicism) were told not to read because for orthodoxy reasons, but I want to suss out how much of it is actually heterodox and if the problematic aspects are really inseparable from other feminist claims vis-a-vis of divine nature. If you have any suggestions, definitely let us know.
“Beyond God the Father” sounds really interesting! I’ll definitely have to search for literature on these topics as well. I’ve also gotten the feeling from a lot of people in the Christian space that certain works shouldn’t be read for reasons of orthodoxy, especially on this topic. However, at a certain point, I think it becomes frustrating when others assume that you don’t have the ability to sift the wheat from the chaff. Especially because writers that we would otherwise consider orthodox, like Aquinas, could express ideas that were wrong or highly problematic, including his understanding of women (as influenced by Aristotle). So on one end we might error in rejecting everything an unorthodox author says including some of the good ideas they have, and on the other end, we could blindly accept everything a saint says without subjecting that to the greater tradition and believe wrong ideas. I’m all for taking a higher level of scrutiny into certain works and authors because their ideas might be corrupted to a problematic degree. And I don’t share seriously difficult or problematic works with people who I don’t think are mature or knowledgeable enough to handle the sifting. But I feel like there is something about this topic in particular that we might actually have to get outside of typical sources to learn more.
Totally agree. I've gone through pretty much the same chain of reasoning recently.