My review of John Grabowski’s Unraveling Gender and Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender is available through Thomistica. An excerpt:
These books can be read together with profit. Both together or either separately could find a place in a suitably designed course or seminar on these topics. While diverse in their literary and rhetorical styles, both present in clear terms a fully Catholic cosmology and anthropology. Both agree and have substantive argumentative overlap in their diagnosis of gender ideology (Grabowski) or the gender paradigm (Favale). For instance, both note the concrete social role of the conditions enabled by the industrial and sexual revolutions. Both highlight the catalytic effects of the internet and social media when it comes to propagating and sustaining the gender paradigm, whether at the academic or personal level.
Both authors provide succinct recapitulations of the beauty of the Church’s teaching on human sexuality, with a particular focus on the magisterium of St. John Paul II (Grabowski, in ch. 6; Favale, in chs. 2 and 9). Whether it is through argument, analysis, or evocative quotations from Wendell Berry, Flannery O’Connor, or the recent popes, they furnish an effective counter-narrative to the gender paradigm.
Indeed, their work proposes the only effective counter-narrative, the calling of humanity out of the darkness of non-being into a purposeful cosmos for the end of participating in God.
John G. Brungardt 