Augustine the Educator, Women at Work, and Pro-Life Men

Plus, book launch in DC on Tues Oct 7!

First off, tomorrow night (Oct 7th) is my book launch party at the Catholic Information Center in DC. I’m so looking forward to this, and I hope to see a bunch of you there.

If you’ve gotten to read the book, it would be a big help if you reviewed the book on Amazon or Goodreads.

Tour swag!

Now, I want to do a quick rundown of some recent reading I’ve enjoyed. I got an early copy of Intimacy and Intelligibility: Word and Life in Augustine’s De magistro, and I loved it.

Is it an “Other Feminisms” book? Well… depends how you consider it. I’m definitely recommending a chapter or two to my ongoing reading group on texts about maternity. Here’s why:

The metaphor of birth is the heart of the dialogue’s logic. Something or someone is being born. But what? On the one hand, the conversation gives birth to deeper insight about why they talk with one another. Father and son’s developing view of language that is, we speak primarily to inform will soon show its deficiencies, when they come to agree that Christ is the teacher of all. On the other hand, and much more fundamentally, the conversation gives birth to them, father and son. Recently baptized, they know their pilgrim lives are not their true end, and they look forward to the life of the blessed in heaven. They are not yet fully born into the life of Christ that they share. They are still being formed, not yet ready to withstand the heat and light of that most blessed realm. Yet they are moving toward the blessed life, from darkness to light, as they speak together about speaking.

Augustine’s metaphor of parturition implies that the conversation in De magistro is not merely instrumental and informative, but generative. Augustine’s speaking does not serve a narrowly instrumental purpose of informing Adeodatus about the nature of the beata vita. No human being could give a comprehensive account of that life. More importantly, no one reaches the beata vita through simply being informed about it. Augustine’s own biography makes this painfully clear. Like every other form of human life, the beata vita is reached only through birth, which is hardly a process one can engineer or manage for oneself. What do we want in speaking together? Augustine’s metaphor hints at an answer: We want to birth each other into the beata vita.

I’ve kicked off an argument on feminine virtue and vice this morning with Helen Andrews, who gave a speech against “The Great Feminization” at NatCon this year.

You can get a preview of Helen’s argument from her tweets here. Today, she was arguing the cultures she opposes can only be fixed when there are fewer women in certain fields.

Helen and I are both Christians, so I do have a big question about her project: it seems to assume God made women as defective men. As I wrote here:

Most of your comments on the great feminization are about distinctively feminine vices. Here the aim is to change demographics.

Why isn’t forming women for virtue a bigger part of this project? Even as you may want to also have some distinctively masculine spaces?

So now we’re having a back and forth on what leadership consists of for women. Plus a little side chat with another commenter on whether you achieve virtue primarily by removing vices (his view) or whether you need to make a big choice for something to be able to leave vices behind (my view).

Finally, I have one more appreciation of Daniel William’s Abortion and America’s Churches, which is my book’s birthday twin. He and his wife had a lovely conversation on Nadya’s substack, with one part I’d particularly highlight.

Interview: Abortion and America's Churches

Nadya: You started research on the pro-life movement years ago, before you became a husband and father. In what ways (if any) has marriage and parenting changed your approach and how you think about this topic?

Dan: I think that my research on the pro-life movement prepared me for marriage and parenting in the sense that it challenged some of the individualistic assumptions that had guided my life before then and prompted me to think about the value of the weak and vulnerable – which is a very important value for any parent to acknowledge. Perhaps I never would have been the husband and father I became if I had not spent several years before that thinking about Christian pro-life claims about the value of self-sacrifice for the sake of someone else…

For much of my life before I got married, I tended to think of fetal rights in terms that are very similar to that of a lot of pro-life men – that is, as individual rights. Yet thoughtful pro-life women often resist this individualistic framing of the issue and instead see the unborn child in relational terms – that is, as an inseparable part of a symbiotic relationship with its mother. I think that my perspective on this matter has been enriched as a result of listening to my wife.

What have you been reading and thinking about?