Are women rational and free people? What did John Paul II say?
Read MoreJohn Paul II's Exploration of the Full Personhood of Women →

John Paul II
Are women rational and free people? What did John Paul II say?
Read MoreA reprint of the book chapter from Holiness through Work: Commemorating the Encyclical Laborem Exercens, edited by Martin Schlag. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine Press, 2022.
Excerpted from my chapter, “A Body of Work: Labor and Culture in Karol Wojtyła,” in Leisure and Labor, ed. Anthony Coleman (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), 127-140.
Read MoreThe woman has the spontaneous, natural power to make space for the other, which embodies the spiritual reality to which all human beings are called.
The man seems light and liquid, the woman heavy and tied down. Likewise, the anorexic strives for the light and airy. She escapes the gravity not only of her body but also of need. Ultimately, both sexual revolution and eating disorders rebel against the given, against what is inescapable. Sex creates babies. Bodies require food. But who says? The rules don’t apply to me. Modernity valorizes the independent, self-sufficient man, as he strides rationally and freely into the well-managed future of his own creation. But the cheerleaders of secularism do not seem to have reckoned with the innately destructive quality of the self that has been unleashed from any transcendent orientation.
Read MoreThe reigning ideology tells us that the unkempt contours of female fertility must be scoured away by a masculine, mechanizing ideology in order to fit into the smooth cogs of the sexual revolution. But is the only paradigm that applies to female fertility one of technological “control”?
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