Denver, Colo., Jul 26, 2018 / 03:56 pm (CNA).- This week, CNA says farewell to our summer intern, Lizzy Joslyn. In her final week at CNA this summer, Lizzy offers “The Genius of Woman,” a four-part series of interviews and profiles, based on Pope St. John Paul II’s “Letter to Women,” and interviews with seven Catholic women from very different walks of life. This is the fourth piece in that series:
A sophomore college student studying political science, Miriam Miller, 18, dreams of becoming a strong and influential advocate for humanitarian causes.
Initially, Miller felt fear and doubt when considering a career in politics. Not wanting “to be mean, argue, tear people apart” in her future career, Miller’s was encouraged when she discovered, through an exploration of the Church teachings, that she “didn’t have to” embody those qualities in order to be successful and happy in her desired field. “That’s not who I am as a person,” she added.
“I don’t want to feel like I have to be this weird little mutant of myself,” Miller said. And, thanks to the feminine genius, she doesn’t have to.
A little refresher: John Paul II, in his 1995 “Letter to Women,” used the idea of the “feminine genius” to praise women for their unique abilities socially and emotionally: “Much more important is the social and ethical dimension, which deals with human relations and spiritual values. In this area, which often develops in an inconspicuous way beginning with the daily relationships between people, especially within the family, society certainly owes much to the ‘genius of women.’”
Miller told CNA that in her experiences attending seminars and events with political leaders, she has encountered some women who seem to avoid anything that might make their femininity stand out. There was a noticeable expectation for women to almost go out of their way to “not look cute,” she said.
Women shouldn’t have to feel like they should hide their feminine qualities out of the fear of harassment, she added.
“Women have kind of lost that feminine grace, which is a good thing… and it’s sad,” Miller said.
God made women with their own unique qualities–the feminine genius–and those should be celebrated and used to further his kingdom, Pope St. John Paul II taught.
Miller said that until she learned that, there were qualities “in myself that I hadn’t allowed to grow because I was told it wasn’t good,” she said. Until Miller realized she didn’t have to hide her femininity, or her perspective, she doubted her aspirations, and her ability to have the future she hoped for.
Embracing the feminine genius gives women power to positively influence the world, John Paul II wrote.
“Perhaps more than men,” wrote John Paul II in his Letter to Women, “women acknowledge the person, because they see persons with their hearts. They see them independently of various ideological or political systems. They see others in their greatness and limitations; they try to go out to them and help them.”
Women humanize the world–their talents socially and emotionally have the potential to create a “civilization of love,” as John Paul II said–a peaceful society that strives to imitate and exemplify God’s perfect love.
CNA’s Managing Editor Michelle La Rosa also sees the feminine genius at work in the workplace. Her interests began in political philosophy, and they translated easily to journalism when in 2011 she began working for CNA in Washington, D.C.
La Rosa, the only female editor at CNA, says she brings a unique contribution to “editorial discussions or in different viewpoints or working with people,” complementing the perspective of her male colleagues.
“There’s… this different perspective that women often bring.”
“Our editors here collaborate really well because we all have very different strengths and weaknesses and very different backgrounds. But I think part of that feminine genius is just kind of seeing the… more human side of things,” said La Rosa.
Women, as John Paul II wrote, “make an indispensable contribution to the growth of a culture which unites reason and feeling, to a model of life ever open to the sense of ‘mystery’, to the establishment of economic and political structures ever more worthy of humanity.”
By most modern standard, “progress,” he wrote, is “measured according to the criteria of science and technology.”
“Much more important,” the pope said, “is the social and ethical dimension, which deals with human relations and spiritual values.” This, he said, is where the feminine genius is uniquely important.
The differences between men and women“doesn’t mean we can’t do the same jobs,” Miller noted, “we just do them differently.”
“Womanhood expresses the “human” as much as manhood does, but in a different and complementary way,” wrote John Paul II. “It is only through the duality of the “masculine” and the “feminine” that the “human” finds full realization.”
“As a rational and free being, man is called to transform the face of the earth. In this task, which is essentially that of culture, man and woman alike share equal responsibility from the start,” he wrote.
“Recognizing the unique gifts and talents of what it means to be a woman is not to degrade men, but it’s to recognize that complementarity and the ways in which men and women can really build off of each other and work together to build up the church and society,” La Rosa said.
[…]
Ugh.
Dick’s Sporting Goods, Starbucks, Levi Strauss, Amazon, Yelp, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Tesla, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Mastercard, Lyft, Disney, Meta, Comcast, Airbnb, Patagonia, Doordash, Paypal, Reddit, Meta, Zillow and Uber, with more probably to come.
Now the lines are truly drawn – let the battle begin.
We won’t be buying that treadmill ($1000+) from Dick’s after all. We wrote the Investor Relations contact to inform them of why.
The partial LIST from A to Z: Amazon, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Levi Strauss & Co., Starbucks, Yelp, Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Tesla, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Mastercard, Lyft, Disney, Meta, Comcast, Airbnb, Patagonia, DoorDash, PayPal, Reddit, Meta, Uber and Zillow. The embedded link adds three more: Condé Nast, Buzzfeed, and Apple.
An earlier LIST: Overlapping this partial Dishonor Roll were the more than 400 corporations who in 2015 filed amici briefs in favor of gay “marriage.” Together they spontaneously (!) filed their legal argument on separate letterheads, asserting a constitutional right to the oxymoron same sex “marriage.” As broadly reported and rewarded in the media, AT&T and Verizon, Dow Chemical, Bank of America, General Electric, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, and the San Francisco Giants, were among nearly four hundred agenda-assimilated corporations and business organizations that weighed in.
The SCAM in 2015: stock market numbers might benefit infinitesimally from spending patterns! So, the business world gave an entirely new meaning to the term: bottom line! The blip of one billion dollars pencils out as 1 in 6,620 of one percent of the federal budget in 2021 ($6.82 Trillion, while the GNP is nearly four times this figure at $25 Trillion).
Today, the reasoning will be the avoided cost of treating pregnant women like women who are carrying a child.
The pygmies and cannibals are in charge.
This is a throwback to the fugitive slave acts.
Aren’t they being a little presumptuous?
Are they offering an equivalent amount to women who want to keep their babies? Choice and all that.
The most egregious example of this I have seen in Hello Bello, which offer “premium” baby itesm (diapers, wipes, suncreen, etc) direct to your door (I guess they do have store fronts in a few locales). Buy diapers, pay for abortions.
.
It is cheaper to pay for the elimination of an employee’s baby than to give them Family Leave/Maternity Leave or whatever. And much cheaper than to help pay for FL/ML after IVF treatments, so yeah, I suspect nearly any company with (gov’t mandated) health insurance will pay for abortions. It is simply looking out for the bottom line.
.
https://notthebee.com/article/hello-bello-is-the-latest-company-offering-to-pay-for-their-employees-abortionswith-money-made-selling-diapers
The fact is that this is purely a money-saving move cloaked in politically correct garments. Now they can be praised in all the right quarters for saving significant expenditures on things like insurance and parental or sick leave.
This is very revealing. And damning.
The culture of death writ large. Support death but disappear when life makes demands.
STOP! HATING! BABIES!
Business people aren’t stupid. Why would they pay for the mass murder of what would soon become paying customers if there wasn’t some immediate incentive to do so?