Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He had a strong Catholic faith, yet was also a scientist, a paleontologist. He developed a philosophy, which he got in trouble for, basically saying that as through evolution organisms evolve into higher complexities, so do humans evolve spiritually to a higher complexity, with the highest what he called "The Omega Point", where the earth, and all it's creatures become god, or God-like. A science approach to 'one with the universe' no less.
It's very interesting, and anything but static. He says that even our drive to "know" is part of this evolving, that the pathologies of society, are a kind of birth pains. What I like about him is that he's so damn hopeful. I'm thinking he never even considered gender roles however, just took 'em for granted.
I'm reading his "The Future of Man"-- here's a bit (1959)
"This idea of the planetary totalisation of human consciousness (with its unavoidable corollary, that whereever there are life-bearing planets in the Universe, they too will become encompassed, like the Earth, with some form of planetised spirit) may at first sight seem fantastic: but does it not exactly correspond to the facts, and does it not logically extend the cosmic curve of moleculisation? It may seen absurd, but in its very fantasy does it not heighten our vision of Life to the level of other and universally accepted fantasies, those of atomic physics and astronomy? However man it may seem, the fact remains that great modern biologists, such as Julian Huxley and J. Bl S. Haldane, are beginning to talk of Mankind and to predict its future as though they were dealing (all things being equal) with a brain of brains"
"The increasing degree, intangible, and too little noted, in which present-day thought and activity are influenced by the passion for discovery; the progressive replacement of the workshop by th laboratory, of production by research, of the desire for well-being by the desire for 'more'-being--what do these things betoken if not the growth in our souls of a great impulse toward super-evolution?
The profound cleavage in every kind of social group (families, countries, professions, creeds) which during the past century has become manifest in the form of two increasingly distinct and irreconcilable human types, those who believe in progress and those who do not--what does this portent except the separation and birth of a new stratum in the biosphere?
I tumbled to this guy years ago through a science fiction series by Julian May called "The Galatic Milieu.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Milieu_Series