Quick with Hospitality, Fruitful for the Kingdom: Family and Gender Relations in the 21st Century Church

Dr. Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen
November 4 & 5, 2003
7:30 p.m., Seminary Auditorium

Dr. Van Leeuwen's lectures will be published by Eerdmans Publishing Company. Real Audio broadcasts for these lectures are included below.

Lecture Broadcasts:

Nov. 4: Whose Hospitality? Whose Kingdom?

Nov. 5: The Cradle and the Lectern

(sound takes 30 seconds to start)

Lecture Abstracts:

The subject of these lectures is the shape of gender and families relations, how these have changed as we have moved from a pre-industrial to an industrial and now to an increasingly post-industrial society, which of these changes Calvinist-leaning Christians might want to endorse (or not) and why.

Tuesday, Nov. 4: "Whose Hospitality? Whose Kingdom?": A critique of the doctrine of separate spheres for women and men (domestic versus public), using historical, theological and social scientific resources, with special reference to recent research on the benefits of equally-shared parenting.

Van Leeuwen will talk about some of the results of Abraham Kuyper’s view of gender and family relations, particularly the functional reduction of parenting to mothering and the problematic withdrawal of fathers from domestic life. This lecture includes research from both industrial and pre-industrial cultures which shows the positive advantages of having fathers, along with mothers, highly involved in hands-on, nurturant yet appropriately authoritative child care.

Wednesday, Nov. 5: "The Cradle and the Lectern": An examination of America's lack of public policy support for men and women doing both waged work and family work, with an agenda for future change.

This lecture looks ahead to the future, concentrating on structural changes that are needed in our own society if this kind of co-parenting is once again to become the norm, as it was prior to the industrial revolution, and as Van Leeuwen believes is reflected by the spirit of the cultural mandate set out in the first creation account of the Bible.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Van Leeuwen is a professor of psychology and philosophy at Eastern University (St. Davids, Penn.) and resident scholar for the Center for Christian Women in Leadership. She was a professor at Calvin from 1985-1993. Her published works include:

• My Brother’s Keeper: What the Social Sciences Do (and Don’t) Tell Us About Masculinity (InterVarsity, 2002).
• After Eden: Facing the Challenge of Gender Reconciliation - co-authored with Annelies Knoppers, Margaret Koch, Douglas Schuurman and Helen Sterk (Eerdmans, 1993).
• Gender and Grace: Love, Work and Parenting In A Changing World (Intervarsity Press, 1990; 11th English printing 2003).

Van Leeuwen has also served as contributing or senior editor for Books and Culture, Radix, The Reformed Journal and Christianity Today.

When not writing books or articles, Mary enjoys music, reading mysteries and teaching Scottish dancing. She is married to an Old Testament scholar and has two adult sons.