I was invited to participate in a Colloquium put on by the Hildebrand Project in early November at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. It was my first time reading Alice von Hildebrand, but I was thankful to learn more about her and meet some wonderful scholars there.

Here is the opening to my response which includes a summary of the Savage’s paper.

“Thank you, Deborah, so much for your paper. I enjoyed reading it and it helped clarify for me some of the deeper motivations that are behind Alice von Hildebrand’s ideas. I’ll try and summarize what I saw as the main points. Savage’s paper draws on Alice von Hildebrand as well as two of her primary sources, Karl Stern and Gertrude LeFort, to demonstrate the essential role that women have in combatting a purely technological approach to life. Savage argues that because of who women are, we can offer a special antidote to the problems of technology; these unique gifts of women, she says, according to Hildebrand, include things such as a focus on the “personal, the living, the concrete, the heart” (p. 2) and the actions of “prayer, sacrifice and love” (p. 3). Savage details for us where these gifts may come from by turning to Stern which includes a phenomenological account of the differing bodily experiences between men and women (pp. 5-6). Next, she turns to LeFort to discuss the idea of receptivity as another gift that women can offer. I see Savage’s conclusion as an empowering call to both men and women to be who we are made to be so that we can respond to the challenges posed by technology today.

In my response, I would like to further the conversation by first talking more about technology — how to define it and how we may relate to it — and second, by asking about this call to combat technology — who is giving it and to whom is it directed.”