What I'm reading
Things may be slowing down around here, but now I’ve got a backlog of all the things I’ve been putting off during the month and a half of various illnesses. Hopefully I’ll be able to write more regularly before too long. In the meantime, here’s this:
A friend sent me this piece, “Catholics, stop being so weird about women” by Simcha Fisher, calling it “maybe the only umproblematic thing on women I’ve read.” For my part, I can say it is definitely one of the better things I’ve read about women.
Excerpt:
The 21st century Catholic woman is already besieged by vicious criticism from the secular world.
She doesn’t need to hear that Heaven is also dolefully shaking its head at her sorry attempts at femininity.
But that’s precisely what happens when we start a sentence with, “Woman are good at …” or “Women’s job is to …” or “The thing that women can offer is …”
It doesn’t matter if you’re a conservative or a progressive, and if your ideas of womanhood are millennia old or newly minted.
Always, when you get specific about women’s roles, there will be a good woman somewhere who is serving God with all her heart, soul, mind, and strength, and she will think, “But I’m not like that.”
Has that been your experience? What do you think about the ways Catholics / Christians talk about women? How helpful are they? How well do they seem to correspond to reality?