Two kingdoms…the one besieged, built of death and darkness and protected by a great barred gate; the other triumphant, built of living stones and surrounded by wide-open gates, beckoning the multitude to enjoy its peace and light.

Pretend for a moment that you, like Simon Peter, are an ordinary and faithful Jew, awaiting the “consolation of Israel” and living during the time of Jesus’ public ministry. You’ve seen a lot of things: miracles, marvels, and masterful teaching. Who is this Jesus? He must be more than a prophet. He’s even greater than Moses. Peter comes to the inevitable conclusion: He must be the Messiah, the promised King, the Anointed One who would restore the kingdom of God upon the earth. Yes, Jesus says, and “you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18).
The little word “gates” conjures up an image—or rather, a network of images, experiences, and associations, many of which might be lost to the modern reader. As Peter meditates on this prophetic word, his imagination will project a cosmic war between two kingdoms, the one besieged, built of death and darkness and protected by a great barred gate; the other triumphant, built of living stones and surrounded by wide-open gates, beckoning the multitude to enjoy its peace and light.
Perhaps your imagination was more meager in its reflections; a brief tour of “gates” in the Bible will help us better envision the victorious City of God.

The promises of God are Yes and Amen in Christ Jesus (2 Corinthians 1:20). That foundation is one that is sturdy. It will hold us. It is not overwhelmed by the waves. The river may rage, but the bottom remains unchanged. We may feel like the billows go over our heads, but be of good cheer, our great foundation is good.

They then addressed themselves to the water; and entering, Christian began to sink. And crying out to his good friend, Hopeful, he said, “I sink in deep waters, the billows go over my head; all his waves go over me.” Then said the other, “Be of good cheer, my brother; I feel the bottom, and it is good.”John Bunyan—The Pilgrim’s Progress
When we reach the day of our death, what will our response be? That day is coming, don’t doubt it. “And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Heb 9:27). John Bunyan describes this day like crossing a great river. And like he wrote for Christian, for some, the waters of that river will seem deep and terrifying. I’d wager that for most, when we face the idea of our own mortality, we still feel the knee-jerk reaction to fear that old enemy. I’d like to think that I’d handle it better than others, but I know myself too well. I know that apart from the grace of God, I will tremble on that day. And if it weren’t for the strong hand of God that upholds me, I know that I could never make it safely over on my own. I want to highlight the encouragement that Hopeful gives to Christian in his hour of despair: “I feel the bottom, and it is good.”
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Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress sees the benefits, counts the costs, tells us how we got here, and gives some advice on muddling through the bitters. No institution—including the Church—is immune from feminism’s influence, so no one can ignore its deeply personal wounds.

Human mastery over nature, exercised technologically, is how human beings experience “progress.” Better medical care to extend life. Cars that prevent crashes and protect us from their effects. More market opportunity for all. We rarely think of how the sweetness of progress comes with corresponding bitter costs—and what that fact teaches about the human condition.
Modern feminism expresses this dilemma of progress. On one hand, women have more schooling and degrees today than ever before; more political and economic rights; and more liberation from unchosen roles. On the other, we no longer really know what a woman is and how other beings (call them men) should relate to women. Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress sees the benefits, counts the costs, tells us how we got here, and gives some advice on muddling through the bitters. No institution—including the Church—is immune from feminism’s influence, so no one can ignore its deeply personal wounds.
For Harrington, feminism rides the wave of deeper movements like industrialization and technological thinking. In the beginning, families were communities, truly the basic units of society. They were economic units where husbands and wives produced what families needed together. These conditions coincided with patriarchal legal and cultural arrangements, but all was softened by the fact that teamwork was essential. Then came “the transition to industrial society,” which took men from the home and created “separate spheres” for men and women. The social and economic conditions for communal marriage vanished, so social mystiques like the “cult of domesticity” were needed to prop up marriage. “Big Romance,” as Harrington calls it, emerged, all the better to encourage women to love their chains. Soon the contradiction was unsustainable.
The first feminism—the good one, as Harrington sees it—defined a woman’s maternal value amidst this mismatch between the mode of production and family form. Such early feminists “valued maternity, care and interdependence alongside just measures of economic and political agency and individual freedom.”
That first feminism did not last, by Harrington’s account, mostly because the market continued to liquify, commodify and alienate and to reduce all human understanding to variations on the pricing mechanism. The result was second-wave feminism, an extreme version of the market mentality, where the male model of market success became the model for everyone. Women could only find their meaning outside the home in paid work, while housework was pawned off on domestics. Sex became transactional. The promise of liberation—indeed, the promise of progress itself— colonized human life through the market mentality.
As a result, as Harrington catalogs, we live in a time when relationships are more difficult to form, when motherhood is neither honored nor aspired to, and female bodies are thought to be the playthings of transgendered technological innovation. Upper-class women can buy some immunity from liquid modernity, but working-class women cannot.
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