{"id":30436,"date":"2023-01-25T08:21:43","date_gmt":"2023-01-25T16:21:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=30436"},"modified":"2023-01-25T08:22:16","modified_gmt":"2023-01-25T16:22:16","slug":"to-feel-is-not-to-be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/to-feel-is-not-to-be\/","title":{"rendered":"To Feel is Not to Be"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Abigail Favale’s spiritual journey has undoubtedly been intriguing. Raised in an evangelical home and having attended George Fox University to study Philosophy, Favale began to question Scripture and the role of women. In time, she was lured away from the faith entirely by feminism, to which she would testify that she lost herself for nearly a decade. In her book, The Genesis of Gender, <\/em>Favale states that feminism led to the destruction of her faith, yet later, it was also feminism that brought her back to Christianity. As a graduate student at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she received her PhD in English, she converted to Catholicism. Favale is married, has four children, and currently serves as a writer and professor at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.<\/p>\n

Before diving into the book, with gender being a contentious topic today, I believe it is invaluable to hear the love Favale has for all<\/em> people that motivates her writing. She states,<\/p>\n

Even as we speak honestly about the machinations of the gender paradigm, we have to realize that there are real people, real lives, being churned up in its gears. We have to welcome these people into our parishes, into our families, into our communities. It is possible to judge whether an ideology is true or false \u2013 but we cannot judge persons; we have not been granted access to the inner chambers of the human heart. Each person\u2019s status before God is a mystery that cannot be known from without. We must critique the framework, in the appropriate time and place, while embracing those who are caught up in that framework, no matter how they look or sound.[1]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The gender paradigm “is a way of seeing that is based on postmodern anti-realism: there is no God; we are not created beings; what we perceive to be real is a social fiction, created by language, including the categories \u2018man\u2019 and \u2018woman.\u2019\u201d[2]<\/a> Favale strongly opposes this notion, yet, despite her opposition, her call to people of faith is that we must maintain the perspective that when discussing aspects of gender and sexuality, we must not lose sight of the reality that people are people with intrinsic value and worth and we must treat them as such. Following are a few key points of interest for me from the book:<\/p>\n