Another great post on Her-meneutics. How do our bodies intersect with our vocations? Women face this more poignantly than men often.

As Lilian Calles Barger observes in her excellent book Eve’s Revenge, much of our modern expectations for women are informed by the welcome progress of feminism in our culture. Yet feminism is also the source of some of our most persistent challenges. As she writes, “Many, but not all, feminist thinkers have built their theories on the assumption that woman’s body is the problem that must be overcome. . . . In this environment woman has no choice but to begin to look for a ‘real me’ beyond her body if she is going to in any way escape its containment. Her desire for radical freedom and autonomy is at odds with the body that keeps her grounded.”

This “body that keeps her grounded” is really the heart of the issue for Mayer and countless other women, some well educated and some less so, as they seek to make sense of the complexity of their lives. Fortunately for Christian women, the body is quite definitively not an impediment, even as it creates profoundly distinctive challenges in our day when work of varying nature is so profoundly bifurcated. From the dawn of creation, Eve is uniquely blessed with work in the garden alongside Adam and also the possibility of the work of bearing children in her flesh. Both types of work precede the Fall. And while the Fall bears plenty of complications for all of us, in Mary we see the role of women redeemed as the fruit of her womb—God Incarnate—crushes the head of the serpent that first struck Eve’s heel in the curse of Genesis 3.