STEUBENVILLE, OH—Franciscan University of Steubenville gathered expert speakers and panelists for the Man and Woman in the Order of Creation Conference held October 24–26. Cosponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) in Washington, D.C., the conference aimed to unpack man and woman’s God-given identities and the implications of those realities through the lens of several disciplines: biology, neuroscience, metaphysics, theology, and psychology.

“The Church puts the question very simply: Why did God make us male and female? And what are the implications of that decision?” said Dr. Deborah Savage, conference organizer and Franciscan University theology professor, in her welcoming address. “The premise at the heart of these proceedings is the conviction that what is needed is a coherent and robust scientifically, philosophically, and theologically grounded account of the nature of man and woman, both in themselves and in relation to one another.”

Francis Maier, EPPC senior fellow in Catholic studies, opened the conference with a talk about what it means to be human. He shared how each person is the work of God with “a unique place and purpose in the world.” In contrast to the modern individualistic and materialistic culture, however, Maier said this creation of both males and females points to the fact that people must depend on each other, noting, “That complementarity of man and woman, that unity of differing mind and body, is fundamental to the human experience. We are not human without it.”

The following day, Dr. John Finley, philosophy professor at Thomas Aquinas College, picked up on these thoughts in his talk on human beings as a microcosm of creation.

“To speak of the human as microcosm means that, in our unity, we display both the spiritual and the material at once,” he said. “We are one thing: a spiritualized body or an embodied spirit.”

The conference went on to feature talks on the significance of sexual differences through the lens of biology, medicine, neuroscience, and psychiatry.

“Sex differences between men and women are not confined to the reproductive organs,” said Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a physician who specializes in psychiatry and director of the EPPC Program in Bioethics and American Democracy. He noted that differences run through all levels of human biology and, “aside from our reproductive organs, the most sexually differentiated organ in the human body is the brain. The differences between men and women are not just physical. They are psychological.”

He pointed out how men and women see and interpret the world differently. He also acknowledged that sex-specific personality traits exist on a bell curve with overlap, yet these variations do not diminish that person’s innate maleness or femaleness.

“One mistake that contemporary gender theory or gender ideology makes is the notion that a man with some characteristically feminine traits or interests is really a woman trapped in a man’s body, and vice versa. That is not true,” Kheriaty said. “He may be a boy who likes ballet, or she may be a girl who likes football. That’s all. A failure to acknowledge the full extent of this variation and overlap in gender traits results in overly rigid cultural stereotypes in what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman.”

Philosophers and theologians then pursued two fundamental questions—“who is man” and “who is woman”—through a metaphysical and theological lens.

In her talk, Dr. Angela Franks, theology professor at St. John’s Seminary and senior fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute, outlined a brief history of how secularization has impacted people’s sense of identity. She talked about how modern culture has misconstrued identity as a sense of self that one constructs, not as a reality that one receives.

“If we conceive of identity not as a project but as a received task, then what becomes most important is not discerning what I want or desire or feel…[but rather] what the source of my identity has in mind for me. In a theistic, transcendent approach, this means discerning the plan of God,” she said. “This plan might be revealed by means of my feelings, preferences, and strengths, but it will also reliably stretch me in unanticipated ways, so this plan cannot simply be read off of my preferences.”

Next, two psychologists who work with couples considered man and woman in daily life, especially in marriage.

Drawing upon Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body teachings, psychologist Dr. Greg Bottaro argued that a woman exercising her feminine genius can help a man grow in his own virtues, and vice versa. This mutual reciprocity of self-gift illustrates how “God made us different for a reason,” he said. “That reason is for us to become better versions of ourselves by receiving and incorporating that which we don’t already have on our own.”

“Marriage is a vocation to holiness because men and women are called to be subject to each other out of love,” he added, “not seeking to be first with our own individual proclivities and perspectives but instead letting ourselves receive and be formed by the other.”

In the conference’s closing panel discussion, Mary Rice Hasson, EPPC’s Kate O’Beirne Senior Fellow and co-founder and director of the Person and Identity Project, offered takeaways and encouraged attendees to “be who you are as a man or as a woman.”

“Our mission as men and women to affect the created order means we have to embrace that difference and we have to collaborate,” Hasson said. “The only way to do that is to be more virtuous.”

During the conference, Franciscan University President Father Dave Pivonka, TOR, and Savage announced Franciscan University’s intention to establish an Institute for the Study of Man and Woman.

Currently in its proposal stage, the institute would pursue study in the meaning and significance of the “anthropological foundation for masculinity and femininity” called for by Pope St. John Paul II in his apostolic exhortation on the laity, Christifideles laici. The pope’s work highlighted how the complementarity of the relationship between men and women is what constitutes their mission not only to create families but also human history itself. Drawing upon these ideas while describing the institute’s mission, Savage pointed out “men and woman both need a much deeper understanding of who they are—their identities, their genius, and their mission—if they are to realize their own humanity and God-given mission.”

The new institute also will introduce a curriculum for Franciscan University students that provides a comprehensive Catholic vision of man and woman.

The conference was made possible by the generosity of the Henkels Family. Additional sponsors included the International Catholic Jurists Forum and Mary Elizabeth Charitable Trust.