The Church is a sexed body, in both carnal and symbolic terms. The Church has sex, but being the Church it does so in a radically creative way. This article explores the contrast between sex as imagined by the Church and as imagined by evolutionary psychology (Darwinism). It argues that the latter reduces sex to reproduction (repetition) and makes this a metaphysical principle, whereas the Church transforms sex into a means for final beatitude. (Christian sex is not about self-perpetuation, but (...) about welcoming strangers; not about children as possessions, but as God's most precious gifts.) Darwinism strangely repeats a debased (neoscholastic) form of the natural law, whereas the Church looks to follow a law that is the dispossessive desire of God for God. Sex after this law orders us towards the infinite joy of our consummation with and in God, in the fellowship of Christ and the holy saints. (shrink)

‘Gender ideology’ is a term used by many, but especially the Vatican, to chastise the view that sexual difference is more than just male and female, sexuality more than desire of the opposite. Each of the three books discussed in this article defends some version of this supposed ideology; each argues—though in different ways—for the need to move beyond a dimorphic account of sexual difference. Their arguments are taken up and deployed against what is here presented as the ideology of (...) sexual dimorphism, as it is seen in the body theology of John Paul II. It is argued that such a theology dehumanises intersexed people, along with homosexuals, and undermines Christian soteriology. The church needs to acknowledge as fully human all who don’t conform to heterosexual dimorphism; it needs to embrace a ‘third sex’ without reserve. (shrink)