Welcome to Job with Julie, hosted by me Julie Slattery.

Let me remind you that this is a listener-supported podcast and it's an outreach of the

Ministry authentic intimacy, which is dedicated to helping you make sense of God and sexuality.

Well I'm super excited to share today's conversation with you. My guest is

Dr. Abigail Favali and Abigail is an author and professor at Notre Dame University who wrote a book a few years ago called The Genesis of Gender.

It's a foundational resource that really helps us understand the story of gender in the Bible.

As Abigail is going to share, the Bible provides a compelling and beautiful picture

of why our gendered bodies matter and how woman has been distorted in our modern understanding.

So I hope you enjoy this fascinating conversation with Dr. Abigail Favali.

Well I feel like the conversation about gender is so prominent today. Everybody wants to talk about it.

But Abigail, from what I read in your book, this has been something that you've been wrestling with

really for decades before it was maybe cool to wrestle with it.

So where did that start?

Oh well that's a good question.

That's like a psycho analyst question a little bit.

I'm a psychologist so I can't.

Ah, there you go.

Okay.

Well, I'm not totally sure why the question of gender has preoccupied me for most of my life.

I have some theories about it, right? I think, you know, I grew up as an evangelical in a fairly conservative area in a context where there were very

clear demarcations between genders and like kind of what you're supposed to do and be and want as a girl or a boy and

there were certain ways in which I mapped on to those expectations and there are certain ways in which I didn't map onto those expectations, right?

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