Bishop Listecki/ Marquette UPDATE: "How in heaven did the hiring ever occur in the first place?"

That's the question Professor Christopher Wolfe of Marquette is asking. We've posted on this issue before, and are happy to see the professor getting down to the underlying issue. From LifeSiteNews:

"Marquette University has seen much controversy erupt over its retraction of a job offer last week to sociologist Jodi O'Brien over her sexually explicit writings. But according to Christopher Wolfe, emeritus professor at Marquette University and director of Thomas International Center, the uproar has been over the wrong thing.

"The question that should be asked is not why Marquette President Father Robert A. Wild backed off the hiring," Wolfe writes, "but how in heaven did the hiring ever occur in the first place?"

"The premise of her writing on sexuality," writes Wolfe, "is that sex is 'socially constructed' and cybersex is especially fluid, since people can try on many different sexual personae." But the problem with theories of social construction that "assume that there are no fixed 'natures' of things that determine what they are," he continues, "is that they are self-contradictory."

"If everything is socially constructed, then the theory of social construction is socially constructed - we have no reason to think it says anything about reality itself," he said.

And this, Wolfe says, means that hiring O'Brien as dean would not merely conflict with Marquette University's commitment to the Catholic Church; it also would conflict with Marquette's commitment to reason.

Bingo. Is reality given or self-created? If the latter, what can the purpose of a university be? Not the search for truth, but the creation of new "realities." The new Bishop of Orlando, Thomas Wenski, has spoken beautifully about this.

Professor Wolfe continued: "Many people (understandably) will be up in arms about the fact that Marquette even considered hiring someone whose fundamental personal and scholarly commitments are so completely at odds with Catholic doctrine," writes the professor. "But an equally important question is why Marquette would consider hiring someone whose ideas are so ungrounded in reason."

Posted by Gibbons J. Cooney