Margaret Harper McCarthy

Margaret Harper McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Theological Anthropology at the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America, in Washington, D.C., where she has taught since 1992. She served as the director of the same Institute’s Center for Cultural and Pastoral Research (CCPR) for its first five years and editor of its journal Humanum: Issues in Family, Culture, and Science. She is on the editorial board of the English edition of the international theological journal Communio as well as the journal The New Ressourcement. She is a member of the Academy of Catholic Theology. She received her doctoral degree in theology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute at the Lateran University in Rome (1994), with a dissertation on the contemporary theology of predestination. Her teaching, writing, and public speaking focus on various themes belonging to theological anthropology especially in their relation to the question of sexual difference: the imago Dei, person, equality, experience, “gender,” and the nature of love. She publishes in Communio, Humanum, and The New Ressourcement. She is the editor of Torn Asunder: Children, The Myth of the Good Divorce and the Recovery of Origins (Eerdmans Publishing, 2016), and author of Recovering Origins (Catholic University Press, 2022).

Click here to see a list of books by Margaret Harper McCarthy

Links to posts and programs featuring Margaret Harper McCarthy:

  • Redefining gender — In this article from Communio, Margaret Harper McCarthy demonstrates that the attempt to eliminate the givenness of sexual difference rests on a denial of the created person’s origin in and ordination toward relations of love. (68 minutes)
  • On the meaning of gender and the truth of human nature — Margaret Harper McCarthy, one of the authors of a brief on gender submitted to the Supreme Court, discusses the philosophical and practical implications of fashionable notions of the meaning of gender. (29 minutes)
  • Not good to be alone — In a lecture titled "Gender and the Common Good," Margaret Harper McCarthy argues that the current ideology regarding gender fundamentally separates people from one another and finally even from themselves. (34 minutes)
  • Justice and gender, round 2 — Margaret Harper McCarthy, one of the authors of a brief on gender submitted to the Supreme Court, discusses the philosophical and practical implications of fashionable notions of the meaning of gender. (33 minutes)
  • “Gender” as ultimate separation — In this November 2018 lecture, Margaret McCarthy explains how the predictions of Pope Paul VI’s Humanae vitae regarding the consequences of separating sex from procreation have proven true. (38 minutes)