The church's General Synod has, however, clarified that it will not abolish or substantially revise any of the currently authorized liturgies.

Nonetheless, this news made headlines and brought up questions of how religions refer to God. Is God male? What pronouns should be used to refer to God?

As a Catholic feminist theologian who runs a women's center at a Catholic university, I understand the impact of the pronouns Christians use for God.

Historically, Christian tradition has recognized many pronouns for God, including "he/him," "she/her" and "they/them."

This is partly because God does not have a gender.

Despite the diverse images used for God in Scripture and Christian tradition, male language and images predominate in contemporary Christian worship.

Many images for God

When we speak about God, we do so knowing that what we say is incomplete. All images for God reveal something about God. No image of God is literal or reveals everything about God.

For example, while Christians can refer to God as a king, they must also remember that God is not literally a king.

Calling God a king expresses that God is powerful.

However, it is not expressing factual accuracy about God's gender or implying that God is human.

Referring to God with many titles, descriptions and images invites many of us to recognize the mystery of God.

God is like all of these things but also more than all of these things.

Thomas Aquinas, an influential 13th-century Catholic theologian, asserted that individuals can talk about God in ways that are true but always inadequate.

Aquinas explained that our language about God affirms something about God, yet God is always beyond what we can express.

We express truths about God in human terms and constructs, but since God is mystery, God is always beyond these categories.

Scripture is filled with multiple images of God.

In some of these images, God is depicted as a father or male. Jesus teaching his disciples to pray the "Our Father" prayer is perhaps the most well-known example of a male title for God.

In other parts of Scripture, God is female.

The prophet Isaiah compares God to a nursing mother in the Book of Isaiah.

A mother hen gathering her chicks is an analogy for God in the Gospel of Matthew.

The Book of Wisdom, a book in the Catholic Bible, depicts wisdom personified as a woman.

Wisdom 10:18-19 states: "She took them across the Red Sea and brought them through deep waters. Their enemies she overwhelmed." This account presents God as female, leading Moses and the Israelites out of Egypt and into the Promised Land.

Depicting God as female in Scripture speaks to God's tenderness as well as strength and power.

For example, the prophet Hosea compares God with a bear robbed of her cubs, promising to "attack and rip open" those who break the covenant.

Elsewhere in Scripture, God has no gender.

God appears to Moses in the burning bush in Exodus 3, defying all gender categories.

The Book of 1 Kings presents a gentle image of a gender-neutral God.

God asked the prophet Elijah to go to a mountain.

While there, Elijah experienced a strong wind, an earthquake and fire, but God was not present in those.

Instead, God was present in a gentle whisper.

The creation stories of Genesis refer to God in the plural.

These examples emphasize that God has no gender and is beyond any human categories.

The social impact of male pronouns

Pronouns, like "He/Him" in the Christian tradition, can limit one's understanding of God. It can also make many individuals think that God is male.

It is not wrong to refer to God with male pronouns, but it can have negative social and theological consequences to refer to God with only male pronouns.

Feminist theologian Mary Daly famously stated, "If God is male, then the male is God."

In other words, referring to God only as the male gender has a significant social impact that can exalt one gender at the expense of others.

Referring to God only as a male can also limit one's theological imagination: Using many pronouns for God emphasises that God is mystery, beyond all human categories.

The Church of England is not only responding to modern questions about gender, but also continuing a long tradition within Christianity of referring to God as male, female and beyond gender constructs.

• Annie Selak is the Associate Director, Women's Center, Georgetown University, United States
• First published in The Conversation. Republished with permission

Even great works of literature and philosophy—from Huckleberry Finn and Heart of Darkness to, believe it or not, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason—are now regularly accompanied by "trigger warnings" that alert prospective readers to the racism, sexism, homophobia, or classism contained therein.

And popping up more and more at our colleges and universities are "safe spaces" where exquisitely sensitive students can retreat in the wake of jarring confrontations with points of view with which they don't sympathize.

My favorite example of this was at Brown University where school administrators provided retreat centers with play-doh, crayons, and videos of frolicking puppies to calm the nerves of their students even before a controversial debate commenced! Apparently even the prospect of public argument sent these students to an updated version of daycare.

Of course a paradoxical concomitant of this exaggerated sensitivity to giving offense is a proclivity to aggressiveness and verbal violence; for once authentic debate has been ruled out of court, the only recourse contesting parties have is to some form of censorship or bullying.

There is obviously much that can and should be mocked in all of this, but I won't go down that road. Instead, I would like to revisit a time when people knew how to have a public argument about the most hotly-contested matters.

Though it might come as a surprise to many, I'm talking about the High Middle Ages, when the university system was born. And to illustrate the medieval method of disciplined conversation there is no better candidate than St. Thomas Aquinas.

The principal means of teaching in the medieval university was not the classroom lecture, which became prominent only in the 19th century German system of education; rather, it was the quaestio disputata (disputed question), which was a lively, sometimes raucous, and very public intellectual exchange.

Though the written texts of Aquinas can strike us today as a tad turgid, we have to recall that they are grounded in these disciplined but decidedly energetic conversations. Continue reading

Sources

• Word on Fire article by Bishop Robert Barron.
• Image: Christian Classics

In 2003, she published Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II, establishing herself as a bold, fresh voice in international Catholic theological circles.

A member of the editorial board of the North American edition of Communio: International Catholic Review, she is also the author of Ratzinger's Faith and Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed.

Last September, Pope Francis appointed her to the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's International Theological Commission.

Recently, she spoke with CWR about her recent appointment and her work with Australia's Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family.

She also shared her thoughts about the forthcoming 2015 Synod of Bishops, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, Cardinal Pell, the Church in Australia, and other topics.

CWR: In September, Pope Francis made new appointments to the International Theological Commission (ITC). Could you tell us about the ITC and its current projects?

Professor Tracey Rowland: The International Theological Commission was created after the Second Vatican Council in the late 1960s. It comprises 30 members all of whom are professional theologians.

The appointments are for 5 years and during those 5 years the theologians work on producing 3 documents covering topics of current theological significance. The three topics for the next 5 years are: (1), synodality, (2) faith and sacraments and (3) religious freedom.

CWR: Synodality seems to be very important to Pope Francis. Already, he has called two Synods of Bishops. And, he has asked the Orthodox to help us understand better the role of syodality in the life of the Church. Was the topic of synodality proposed by Pope Francis himself? As a theologian, what do you make of his sense of synodality? Why do you think it is an important issue for the ITC to discuss? Continue reading

Source and Image:

• The Catholic World Report

Although it may seem strange to many in the West, contemporary Chinese scholars find Thomas's thought not simply fascinating, but of enduring relevance.

I have just spent one month at four Chinese universities, speaking of the ways in which Thomas's understanding of the relationship among philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences can be used to disentangle contemporary confusion about the philosophical and theological implications of evolutionary biology and cosmology.

In Shanghai, Beijing, and Wuhan, I found receptive, enthusiastic audiences.

Most Chinese graduate students who study Western philosophy specialize in either German philosophy, with an emphasis on Kant or Hegel, or in some form of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, especially the philosophy of mind.

Still, I encountered those who were learning Greek and Latin in order to read Aristotle and Aquinas in their original languages.

One evening in Beijing, I discussed passages in Aristotle's Physics with students who were taking a graduate seminar on Thomas Aquinas' Commentary on Aristotle's ‘On the Soul.'

One student from Fudan University in Shanghai wants to compare the ways in which certain Chinese thinkers search for metaphysical foundations of ethics with the way in which Thomas Aquinas does; another in Wuhan is examining the different senses of "science" in Thomas's works.

The number of those studying Thomas may be small, but, as Aristotle observed, a beginning is more than half.

Wuhan's Thomas Study Center

At the University of Wuhan, I spoke at a three-day conference dedicated to Thomas Aquinas and medieval philosophy.

The conference was jointly sponsored by the Thomas Study Center in the Department of Religious Science in the School of Philosophy of the University of Wuhan, Fu Jen Catholic University of Taiwan, and the Li Madou Center in Italy.

That there is a Thomas Study Center at a major Chinese university, and that it has been in existence for nearly two decades, may itself be surprising to many. Continue reading

Sources

• The Witherspoon Institute
• Image: St Dominic's Priory, Macau

In part, this is a result of a misunderstanding.

We often think that the primary reason to ban incest is to prevent genetic abnormalities or other harm to children who might be conceived.

When there are so many options available by which to prevent such harm, this reasoning seems less and less intelligible.

Incestuous couples could simply refrain from having children, for example, or use assisted reproduction technology to conceive healthy ones.

The lack of intelligibility does not mean that there is a wave of defenders of incest attempting to break the taboo, although there are some.

But it does offer an opportunity to reconsider why incest is a bad thing for a society to tolerate.

And in doing so we might recognize that the problem to which incest gives rise has infiltrated our society by other means, posing a major threat to the health and stability of our families.

The Philosophical Case Against Incest

In the Supplement to his Summa, Thomas Aquinas discusses questions of consanguinity.

After asking whether consanguinity is an impediment to marriage by virtue of the natural law, he gives three reasons that it is.

Interestingly, none of these reasons makes reference to difficulties with offspring.

Rather, Aquinas holds that incest is contrary, first, to the order of relations that should exist between parents and their children.

A daughter cannot relate in the appropriate ways to her father both as father and as spouse, for example.

Aquinas's third reason is that incest is contrary to an "accidental" end of marriage: the binding together of humankind and the extending of friendship. Continue reading

Sources

• Public Discourse
• Image: Fair Observer

This does not make Aquinas a biblical literalist. He argues that the Bible is written in metaphors that render the divine mystery meaningful for finite human minds. We depend on material objects for our knowledge, and therefore we can only speak of God as if God, too, were part of the material world. Biblical language is multilayered, opening itself to mystery the more one allows its meanings to unfold. Aquinas says of scripture that "the manner of its speech transcends every science, because in one and the same sentence, while it describes a fact, it reveals a mystery" (ST I.1.10). Anyone who has ever thrilled to poetry understands this. Profound truths speak to us through ordinary metaphors when we take time to listen and reflect. Indeed, Aquinas insists that we should avoid exalted imagery when we speak about God, in case we are deceived into taking our language too literally. Read more

Sources

• Tina Beattie in The Guardian
• Image: London Lay Dominicans
• See also: Thomas Aquinas, part 2: the mind as soul and Thomas Aquinas, part 1: rediscovering a father of modernity
• Tina Beattie is Professor of Catholic Studies at Roehampton University, London, and a frequent contributor to the Catholic weekly, The Tablet and the online journal, Open Democracy