HOLD MY HAND A LITTLE LESS: The above posts were all provoked by two things: 1) I’m writing a novel about a transgendered (FTM) Yale student from a Catholic family, and that student’s feminist friends; and 2) because of that novel, I went to a discussion at the Yale Women’s Center: “I Agree with Eve: Women and God.”

(The title is due to some kind of creepy evangelical thing, where people wore t-shirts with some dude’s face and the logo, “I Agree with Adam,” where Adam is an evangelical dude, so when people ask you about your t-shirt you can, I guess, share the Gospel. Because that will totally work.)

Anyway–I have all kinds of minor observations of the Women’s Center (IT IS OKAY TO DISAGREE, OMG–you don’t have to act like disagreement is nuclear warfare!)–but the main thing this meeting made clear to me is that feminist analysis can’t understand Christianity from within because feminist analysis is power analysis, and Christianity makes power at best a contested and conflicted category. Power isn’t what a Christian seeks. So you can say what you want about Christian history; but Christian theology just doesn’t lend itself to feminist analysis, because receptivity, docility, servanthood, all of these aren’t negative categories for Christians.

“Ardent sweetness” isn’t an oxymoron for us.