Feminism and postmodernity: when critics don’t really read

by Marta Rodriguez

In the Catholic academic world, it is not uncommon to encounter criticisms of postmodern authors, including some feminist thinkers, by those who, in truth, have never seriously read them. I often notice the same few quotations from Simone de Beauvoir or Judith Butler being repeated, accompanied by rather superficial objections, to the point of attributing to them statements they never actually made. I find this not only unfair but also dangerous.

Thinkers like Daniel Dennett and Paul Graham distinguish between two ways of engaging in dialogue. The first is the “straw man” approach, in which the weakest version of someone else’s idea is presented in order to ridicule and refute it easily. Unfortunately, this is often what happens when we engage with authors who are distant from Christian thought. The second is the “steel man” approach, which reconstructs the other’s argument in its strongest and most coherent form, even improving it, before pointing out any weaknesses or contradictions.

Pope Francis has repeatedly said that we are not merely living through an era of change, but a change of era. Such a historical turning point calls for a new paradigm, and therefore, new syntheses. Nonetheless, how can we achieve them without a genuine exercise of open reason, as Pope Benedict XVI liked to say? And how can we be credible if we do not allow ourselves to be seriously challenged by thinkers whose ideas we may not share?

This is also the perspective taken by Pope Leo XIV, who, in his meeting with the Centesimus Annus Foundation, encouraged us to understand the Church’s social teaching not as a rigid set of predefined answers, but as a living body of knowledge, the fruit of listening, of hypotheses, of dialogue and encounter. Only in this way, he said, can doctrine support dialogue and contribute to building a culture of encounter.

Today, we need the kind of courage that Paul VI recognized in Saint Thomas Aquinas: the “courage of truth, the freedom of spirit in addressing new problems, the intellectual honesty of one who does not tolerate the contamination of Christianity by profane philosophy, but neither it’s a priori rejection”.

I would like to see a bit more of that courage among today’s Catholic thinkers.