Questions surrounding sex and gender, and sexual equality and freedom, are especially fraught these days, both personally and politically. Through close study of texts and seminar style discussion, this week long summer course moves from metaphysics to ethics to politics, asking the following questions with “sex and gender” foremost in mind:
We explore questions of body and soul and the relationship between them by reading Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, Judith Butler, Shulamith Firestone, and others
Students can look forward to Professors Franks & Bachiochi, their personal guides to challenging texts.
We explore questions of education and wisdom, virtue and happiness, sex and marriage, and work and family obligations by reading Christine de Pizan, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Sarah Grimke, Margaret Sanger, Dororthy Sayers & others.
The seminar environment provides room for discussion & disagreement. We encourage a wide-range of viewpoints and responses to course material!
We explore questions of friendship and the common good, political freedom and legal equality, rights and duties, the purpose of law and the ends of government by reading Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Catharine MacKinnon & others.
In the evenings, students will have time to explore Boston & build community. Alumni of the seminar stay connected after the week is over, many staying in touch years later!
- Seminar Faculty -
Erika Bachiochi JD
Erika Bachiochi is a legal scholar specializing in Equal Protection jurisprudence, feminist legal theory, and Catholic social teaching, and sexual ethics. A graduate of Middlebury College, Erika was a Bradley Fellow at the Institute for Religion and Politics at Boston College, received her law degree from Boston University School of Law, and spent a year as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School. Her latest book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision was published by Notre Dame University Press in 2021.
Angela Franks Ph. D. -St. John’s Seminary-
Angela Franks, Ph.D., is a theologian, speaker, writer, and mother of six. She serves as Professor of Theology at the Theological Institute for the New Evangelization at St. John's Seminary in Boston. Her areas of specialty include the theology of the body, the New Evangelization, the Trinity, Christology, and the thought of John Paul II and Hans Urs von Balthasar.