Franciscan University of Steubenville Conference Highlights the Nature of Man and Woman

STEUBENVILLE – Franciscan University of Steubenville has assembled expert speakers and panelists for the Man and Woman in the Order of Creation conference held Oct. 24-26. The conference, co-sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, aimed to unravel the God-given identities of man and woman and the implications of those realities through the lens of several disciplines: biology, neuroscience, metaphysics, theology and psychology.

“ThecChurch asks the question very simply: why did God make us male and female? And what are the consequences of that decision?” said Deborah Savage, conference organizer and professor of theology at Franciscan University, in her welcome address. “The premise underlying these proceedings is the belief that what is needed is a coherent and robust scientific, philosophical and theologically based account of the nature of man and woman, both in themselves and in relation to each other.”

Francis Maier, EPPC senior fellow in Catholic Studies, opened the conference with a talk on what it means to be human. He talked about how every person is the work of God “a unique place and purpose in the world.” However, in contrast to modern individualistic and materialistic culture, Maier points out that people must be dependent on each other. “That complementarity of man and woman, that unity of different minds and bodies, is fundamental to the human experience. Without it we are not human.”

The next day, John Finley, professor of philosophy at Thomas Aquinas College, picked up these thoughts in his lecture on man as a microcosm of creation.

“To speak of man as a microcosm means that in our unity we exhibit both the spiritual and the material at the same time.” he said. “We are one thing: a spiritualized body or an embodied mind.”

The conference continued with lectures on the meaning of sexual differences through the lens of biology, medicine, neuroscience and psychiatry.

‘Sex differences between men and women are not limited to the reproductive organs’ said Aaron Kheriaty, a physician who specializes in psychiatry and director of the EPPC Program in Bioethics and American Democracy. He noted that differences run through all levels of human biology and that “Aside from our reproductive organs, the brain is the most sexually differentiated organ in the human body. The differences between men and women are not just physical. They are psychological.”

He pointed out how men and women see and interpret the world differently. He also recognized that sex-specific personality traits exist on a bell curve with overlap, but that these variations do not diminish that person’s innate masculinity or femininity.

“A mistake that contemporary gender theory or gender ideology makes is the idea that a man with some typically feminine traits or interests is actually a woman trapped in a man’s body, and vice versa. That’s not true,” Kheriaty said. “He could be a boy who likes ballet, or she could be a girl who likes football. That’s it. Failure to recognize the full extent of this variation and overlap in gender characteristics results in overly rigid cultural stereotypes about what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman. ”

Philosophers and theologians then examined two fundamental questions: “who is man” And “who is woman” – through a metaphysical and theological lens.

In her lecture, Angela Franks, professor of theology at St. John’s Seminary and senior fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute, provided a brief history of how secularization has affected people’s sense of identity. She talked about how modern culture has misinterpreted identity as a sense of self that you construct, rather than as a reality that you receive.

“If we think of identity not as a project but as a received task, then the most important thing is not to discern what I want, desire or feel… (but rather) what the source of my identity has in mind for me. In a theistic, transcendent approach, this means discerning the plan of God.” she said. “This plan can be revealed by my feelings, preferences, and strengths, but it will also reliably challenge me in unexpected ways, so this plan cannot simply be read from my preferences.”

Then two psychologists who work with couples looked at men and women in everyday life, especially in marriage.

Drawing on Pope John Paul II’s theology of the body, psychologist Greg Bottaro argued that a woman exercising her feminine genius can help a man grow in his own virtues, and vice versa. This mutual reciprocity of self-giving illustrates how “God Made Us Different for a Reason” he said. “That reason is that we want to become better versions of ourselves by receiving and absorbing what we do not yet have.”

“Marriage is a vocation to holiness because men and women are called to be submissive to each other out of love.” he added, “not trying to be first with our own individual tendencies and perspectives, but instead allowing ourselves to be shaped by the other.”

In the conference’s closing panel discussion, Mary Rice Hasson, EPPC’s Kate O’Beirne Senior Fellow and co-founder and director of the Person and Identity Project, offered takeaways and encouraged attendees to “be who you are as a man or as a woman.”

“Our mission as men and women to influence the created order means that we must embrace that difference and work together.” Hasson said. “The only way to do that is to be more virtuous.”

During the conference, Rev. Dave Pivonka, TOR, president of Franciscan University, and Savage announced Franciscan University’s intention to establish an Institute for the Study of Man and Woman.

The institute is currently in the proposal stage and would conduct research into the meaning and significance of the “anthropological basis for masculinity and femininity” called for by Pope John Paul II in his apostolic exhortation on the laity, Christifideles laici. The Pope’s work emphasized how the complementarity of the relationship between men and women is their mission, not only to create families, but also to human history itself. Drawing on these ideas when describing the institute’s mission, Savage noted “Men and women both need a much deeper understanding of who they are – their identity, their genius and their mission – if they are to realize their own humanity and God-given mission.”

The new institute will also introduce a curriculum for Franciscan University students that offers a comprehensive Catholic vision of man and woman.

The conference was made possible by the generosity of the Henkels family. Other sponsors included the International Catholic Jurists Forum and the Mary Elizabeth Charitable Trust.

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