Recent reading

We've just received our CBE Priscilla Papers and I've read the lead article by MaryKate Morse, titled GenderWars: Biology Offers Insights to a Biblical Problem. This would have to be one of the best distilled articles that I have read on this subject. It comes hard on the heals of my reading at Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen's work, My Brother's Keeper: What the Social Sciences Do (and don't) Tell Us About Masculinity. (Can't wait to get hold of her book, Gender and Grace.)
It's the first time that I've looked seriously at the biology issue. Generally I'd leave that up to the experts in that field. But this article by MaryKate Morse is so compelling, and yet simply put, in it's argument that I cannot but be moved by its content and want to share it all around. I've thought of a whole bunch of people that I'd like to send it to. Not as an, "I told you so," deal, but in a genuine desire to inform others (yes, some are antagonists) of the value of the level of argument in this article.
Her opening lines tell the story, and I quote: "Men and women struggle to understand each other and to thrive together as God intended. God's design of an Edinic relationship where male and female together nurture and steward the earth rarely seems to happen. Women often suffer worldwide from assumptions that they have less status and purposefulness than their brothers. Men often suffer from being alone at the top and alone in the struggle of life's battlefields. Children can suffer the consequences of the ongoing acrimony between parents. Gender wars are destructive." In that section alone there are four very worthwhile Endnotes to reinforce her line of argument up to that point.
It's worth stating the reasoning behind her offering and again I quote: "The problem is Theological, not secular. It began in the Garden, not in the 21st Century... Surprisingly, deciding between the interpretations depends not only on one's underlying theological views, but also on one'sbiological assumptions about the nature of gender... And, as we will see, a synthesis of recent biological discoveries on the essence of femaleness and maleness provides an opportunity to understand more clearly God's intention in Genesis 1-2 and the impact of the fall in Genesis 3. This leads to suggestions for ameliorating the division between males and females that move beyond certain polarizing hierarchicalist and egalitarian views."
It is a great shame that it is so difficult to get people who fall into either of these camps to dialog on the issues. From my experience there is much more tension from the Traditionalist area and one is dismissed as a heritic for even suggesting that certain passages could be interpreted differenty. That's sad because most egalitarian christians have a very high view of scripture. This article by MaryKate could go a long way toward healing that rift. If only people would read it!
The article in its entirety is from Priscilla Papers, Volume 20, Number 1, Winter 2006. I tried to get the link so that I could post it here and you could look it up on the net but at the time of writing my computer could not locate the server.