Loyola Marymount U. Student Reportedly Penalized for Referring to God as ‘He’ in an Assignment
“I urge LMU to think deeply about the kind of school that they would like to be.”
Loyola Marymount is a Catholic school and I sincerely hope students raise hell over this.
Campus Reform reports:
Students continue to speak against professors’ pronoun mandates
The California College Republicans issued a statement Monday “condemning” Cecilia González-Andrieu, a professor at Loyola Marymount University who allegedly penalized a student for referring to God as “He” in an assignment.
Yesterday’s announcement follows a semester of controversy at the Catholic university over pronoun usage.
Christopher Miller, a yoga studies professor, mandated his students include pronouns on their blog assignments, Fox News reported in November.
“The story coming out of the Yoga Department is just another link in a long train of abuses,” LMU GOP President Will Donahue said in a Dec. 1 statement. “I urge LMU to think deeply about the kind of school that they would like to be.”
Donahue told Campus Reform that the policy was “a violation of free speech.”
The joint statement between the California College Republicans and its LMU chapter also lays blame on LMU and President Timothy Law Synder.
“The California College Republicans (CCR) join our chapter at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) and RenewLMU in condemning LMU and University President Timothy Snyder for allowing professors to mandate the use of gender pronouns on assignments,” the statement reads.
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Comments
Heh. Yoga “studies.”
We’ve run into this cretin before, have we not?
Any school that has a “Yoga Studies Department” can’t be taken seriously. It must be a school for Young Marxists taught by old hippies. Students should know better than to go there.
Last time I checked, the Catholic Church still refers to the Trinity as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit”. The Apostle’s Creed is still “Patrem omnipotentem” (Father almighty).
Once again, if a Catholic university refuses to uphold Catholic teaching, it needs to stop calling itself Catholic. Naturally, it is also another Jesuit university, which tells me a lot.
In Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew any and all references to God are in the masculine and only accurately translated in the masculine, Even Kabbalistic concepts or other usages in the Talmud which sound feminine such as Shechinah refer to God as the King of the Universe-not the queen. This so called professor should find a gym to express his views, as opposed to a classroom
The simplest explanation for why the Bible always refers to God in the masculine is simply that there is no such thing as gender-neutral language in Hebrew, so it had to choose one gender or the other, and using the masculine makes more sense than using the feminine.
According to kabala there is a deeper reason: The masculine principle is one of giving, providing, and the feminine principle is receiving. In God’s relationship with the universe He is the provider and we are the recipients. So He is masculine in relation to us, and we are feminine in relation to Him.
However although (as Steven wrote) He is a King, not a Queen, his faculty of Kingship when considered in isolation is referred to in the feminine, because it does not originate anything of its own, but rather receives from His intellect and emotions and communicates that to the universe. The same applies to all the ways in which He relates to and communicates with the universe; that faculty of communication and relationship is referred to in the feminine because it receives and transmits, rather than originating anything.
But these are all ways to describe not Himself but how we perceive Him as acting. Jewish theology says that we cannot know anything about His own nature, so we cannot speak of it intelligibly. We can only speak about what we can see, which is His behavior.
OK, I understand your point, but how does it speak to this situation with Yoga Guy?
Yoga guy has nothing to do with God; all he did was require students to include pronouns on their blog assignments. I think you mean the theology prof, Cecilia González-Andrieu, who requires students to write a footnote justifying the pronouns they use for God, thus presumably implying that the default should be to refer to Him in the neuter gender, which is just weird.
” … and using the masculine makes more sense than using the feminine.” And that is why?
Because in most contexts using feminine pronouns for God just sounds weird. In very few contexts would it sound appropriate.
Excellent post. So well composed and written that one cannot imagine a faculty member at LMU being capable of such cogent thought and writing. And that, my friends, is indeed the problem with current higher education.
How does this prof know that God is not a woman identifying as a man and using male pronouns?
Mighty transphobic of her!
In before that Prof demands you say ‘firmament’ instead of sky.