"The second sex speaks..." : En studie av Alice von Hildebrands och Margaret Harper McCarthys teologiska antropologi

• Main Author: Erlandsson, Johan
• Format: Others
• Language: Swedish
• Published: Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för kulturvetenskaper (KV) 2021
• Subjects: feminism; Catholic; agency; post-secular; Mahmood; queer; de Beauvoir; traditional; katolicism; agens; post-sekularism; traditionell religion; Religious Studies; Religionsvetenskap
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-101666

This paper studies the theological anthropologies of the Catholic thinkers Alice von Hildebrand and Margaret Harper McCarthy. I place my research of these two theologians, categorized as religiously conservative thinkers, among other contemporary research on women in traditional religions by using types of agencies inspired by researchers such as Phyllis Mack, Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood. This paper analyzes how the two theologians construct their anthropologies, systems that see man in a relationship with a God-given order that dictates the role of freedom and responsibility in both the relationship with fellow human beings and his or her teleological goals. I argue that this anthropology comes from their reading of biblical passages and interpretations of real life experiences that break with secular, liberal and individualist patterns of thought. Using a hermeneutics aware of the tensions between secular readings of religious texts and readings that focuses on a self-transcendence, I present a reading of the theologians' systems of thought as a balancing act between liberal and poststructuralist feminist critiques. I argue that both Hildebrand and McCarthy reject the liberal and poststructuralist anthropologies because of their conviction that the liberal and poststructuralist anthropology is inadequate by not addressing the ontological reality of the human complementarity of the sexes. I also identify a tension in the theologians critique of feminism and what I take to be a dialectic between criticizing and appropriating feminist goals for women.