Is not personalism merely a form of individualism—more humane (perhaps) than old-fashioned, rights- based individualism, but not humane enough to keep from reducing the human person to an inhuman abstraction stripped of the concrete particulars that define every human life, like sex and gender?
That has been the tendency of most personalist theory. For all its emphasis on the “essential relationality” of human persons, personalism has all but ignored the absolutely essential human relation of male and female, on which depends not only the psychological health of each human person, but also the very existence of all human persons since Adam and Eve.
This tendency has deep roots in Western thinking—pre-Christian roots traceable to the ancient Greek philosophers who saw male and female as merely a bodily difference of little relevance to the sexless soul— except that the body was believed to trouble the souls of women more than the souls of men. To escape the cycle of reincarnation, women had to first become men.
