Dr. Angela Franks Shares Why it’s Necessary for Academic Institutions to Address Sex and Gender

Angela Franks, Ph.D., is a theologian, speaker, writer, and mother of six. Her areas of specialty include the body, identity, the Trinity, Christology, and the thought of John Paul II and Hans Urs von Balthasar. She has written two books on sexual ethics and the history of eugenics.

She knows better than most the challenges that we are facing in the culture war of sexuality and gender. She is currently focused on bringing key ideas in contemporary Continental philosophy into conversation with the Catholic intellectual tradition. She is also finishing a two-volume book manuscript entitled The Body and Identity.

Dr. Franks and Leah Jacobson, Program Manager for the MA in Catholic Women’s and Gender Studies, recently had a short conversation about the need for academic institutions to step into the conversation and guidance and space for students to work through the complexities of the arguments on sex and gender.

Please take a moment and watch the interaction on video where Dr. Franks shares,

“There’s a lot of narratives in the culture about what it means to be a woman, what gender is or isn’t, and it’s really important that the thousands of years of Catholic thought on these questions is offered to people in an academic setting. It’s really important to be able to analyze the proposals out there that often are very technical and academic to have the support of an academic setting to analyze those but coming from a Catholic viewpoint.”

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Franks to our MA in Catholic Women’s and Gender Studies program as a guest lecturer!

For more information, please visit stthom.edu/GenderStudies