This post is part of Support a Catholic Speaker Month. Check out that site to read about more neat Catholics out there. And there are still openings, so I encourage you to sign up and learn more about someone you might not be familiar with!
Dr. Pia de Solenni is one of the New Feminists! And Pope John Paul II thinks she's cool!
Yes, her doctoral dissertation, entitled A hermeneutic of Aquinas's Mens through a sexually differentiated epistemology: towards an understanding of woman as imago Dei, received the 2001 Pontifical Academies' Prize, awarded in person by the late great pope. I haven't been able to get my hands on her dissertation itself (and let's be honest, it might be a bit much for someone with no training in theology or philosophy to bite off), but luckily a popular version of it is due out in the near future! It's called Different and Equal: The Old Feminists and New Feminism and I absolutely cannot wait to read it. Amazon is supposed to email me an alert when it is available - I'll keep you informed! In the meantime, I'll share with you this quote from her dissertation:
Woman is created in the image of God. Like man, she is created for the purpose of knowing - ultimately knowing God. True feminism, therefore, respects woman's essential identity as an image of God. Where she differs from man, a true feminism understands that these differences are constructive and complementary.
The pages about her on wikipedia and TMG speakers are short and sweet, if you want just the official bio. For a more substantial article on her, check out this alumni profile of her from Thomas Aquinas College. It's really interesting, and I'll limit myself to just one of her quotes from the story.
"As a result of many feminist theories, woman begins to be considered an atomistic individual, an individual without relations to others. Yet, we see that in every aspect of our life - for both men and women - we need others. Our happiness relates intimately to our relations with others because we come to know ourselves and others, including God, through these relations.
The Christian tradition has shown us that the feminine vocation is lived out in countless ways - look at the women saints. You can't put it in a box and say that a woman should do x, y and z. True feminism concerns itself more with how a woman exists, rather than the jobs that she can do. Whatever she does, she does as a woman, not as a genderless creature. The same is obviously true for a man."
One thing I find really interesting is that she is really a new feminist, as opposed to an anti-feminist. New feminists and anti-feminists share many ideas (for example, the complementarity of men and women); it seems to me that the main difference is that new feminists recognize the good that feminism has achieved and they want to pull it back on track, while anti-feminists want a return of the pre-feminist "good ol' days" (but that's a topic for another post).
Pia de Solenni worked at the Family Research Council for a while, but now she's the director of Diotima Consulting. Her website http://piadesolenni.com/ has unfortunately been down for a couple weeks, but hopefully it will get back up soon and you can go straight to the horse's mouth. And in the meantime, I discovered she twitters! (I don't, but apparently you can go to the twitterer's site to read their tweets. Is it twitterer or tweeter? I'm so lame.)
And you can check out her stuff in other ways. I think she might have a weekly segment on Teresa Tomeo's show Catholic Connection. (I've heard snippets of this show in the car a few mornings and enjoyed it, so listen for it on your local Catholic radio station/EWTN.) Also, she's written loads of articles! Here are a few links to them, which are great. (Warning: You might inadvertently spend hours reading her stuff and searching for more of it.)
- Christian Feminism: A Fuller View of Woman from Zenit (2002). "As Christians, we recognize the inherent equality of all human beings, man and woman. The differences are constructive even if we don't understand them. Remember that the differences existed before original sin. The tensions that arise from them, however, are due to original sin."
- Now the Conversation Can Begin from the National Catholic Reporter (2004). "[A] complete read of the new Vatican letter, reveals something dynamic. It sets the ground to begin a theological conversation on sexual difference that has taken more than a hundred years to arrange."
- Our Role in The Church from the Washington Post (2005). "Before I went to Rome to do my doctoral work in theology in the mid-1990s, I was inclined to believe, like many American women, that the Catholic Church's teaching on women was a bit skewed, if not flawed."
- The Notion of Beauty from a keynote address (2005). "And just as there are two types of beauty, there are two directions of beauty: towards the self or towards the other. Beauty that draws attention to the self can do so in a way that it makes the self an object. At the same time, beauty also has the power to reveal the self as a subject. "
- American Spectator A list of eight articles by her in that magazine (2005-2008).
- Women and the Catholic Church from Sanctis sancta mundana munanis (2006). "Had he done a serious historical analysis, [DaVinci Code author Dan] Brown would have found just how groundbreaking the Catholic Church has been in its regard for women."
This woman and her work are awesome!