at school

I've arrived in St. Louis for my four day intensive time (the course is Bible Interpretation). Baby is teething so its going to be a super fun week I can tell. I'm cramming all the reading down my throat, metaphorically speaking, and complaining with my classmates about the impossibility of having to 'draw my world view'. However, the silver lining of the day was reading Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World. Of course, as a protestant, I'm not particularly concerned with what the Vatican has to say about so many things, but I found this letter to contain some very nice lines.

Formed by God and placed in the garden which he was to cultivate, the man, who is still referred to with the generic expression Adam, experienced a loneliness which the presence of the animals is not able to overcome. He needs a helpmate who will be his partner. The term here does not refer to an inferior, but to a vital helper. This is so that Adam's life does not sink into a sterile and, in the end, baneful encounter with himself. It is necessary that he enter into relationship with another being on his own level. Only the woman, created from the same 'flesh' and cloaked in the same mystery, can give a future to the life of the man.

The document doesn't quite arrive at the love/respect level, but it goes a good distance away from feminism. I'm just irritated overall by the 'church's', and everyone else's for that matter, need to affirm the role/position/wisdom/etc. of women. Its tiresome. Anyway, the great fight begins in the morning, I will update as it rages.