Category: Women in the Church
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Inequality: Orthodox Christian Responses and Limitations
by Efstathios Kessareas Equality is a core idea and value of modernity. Yet contemporary societies are marked by multiple forms of inequality, for instance, socioeconomic and gender ones. What is the attitude of the Orthodox Church towards inequality? Do unequal relations exist within the Church too, and if yes, how does it address them? No […]
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The Resurrection Miracle Revealed to the Myrrhbearers
by V. K. McCarty | български | ქართული | ελληνικά | Русский | Српски The first rising of the sun in the East shoots rose light across the dim landscape; it is a time the early monks knew well, for a prayer service was starting, when the bell-ringer could just begin to see the lines […]
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St. Kassia and the Mary Magdalene Complex
by Thomas Arentzen | български | ქართული | ελληνικά | Română | Русский | Српски It seems to me, we live in Kassiani times. Holy Week is approaching and with it the singing of the sticheron on the sinful woman, followed shortly by the Holy Saturday kanon, which is at least partly by the same […]
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Encouragement from the Desert Mothers in Troubling Times
by V.K. McCarty | български | Ελληνικά | Română | Русский “In the morning, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed” (Mark 1:35). Jesus may have prayed about several of the things that worry us today: the feeling that the world has […]
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Deaconesses: An Orthodox Institution Untheologically Blocked
by Petros Vassiliadis At the initiative of the Center of Ecumenical, Missiological and Environmental Studies “Metropolitan Panteleimon Papageorgiou” (CEMES), an International Scientific Symposium on “Deaconesses. Past-Present-Future” was organized in Thessaloniki (1/31-2/2, 2020) at the International Hellenic University (IHU), to which its Inter-Orthodox English-speaking Post-graduate Program “Orthodox Ecumenical Theology” belongs. In addition to ΙΗU, 4 other […]
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Catholic Objections to Women’s Altar Service: Barred from the Sacred
by Phyllis Zagano The question of women deacons continues to be discussed in the Catholic Church, and questions about women are again in the news. Whether the discussion is about priestly celibacy or about ordaining women to the diaconate, the common denominator is that women are unclean. In the Roman Catholic Church, marriage is a […]
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Scholars Not Priests
by George Demacopoulos | Ελληνικά | Русский | српски In a seminal essay in 1990, the eminent scholar of early Christianity, Elizabeth Clark, demonstrated that Christianity grew rapidly, in large part, because women served as the community’s earliest financial benefactors—they were “Patrons not Priests.”[1] According to Clark, female patronage was not only a matter of Christian […]
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Domestic Violence and Accountable Actions in the Orthodox Church
by Mariz Tadros My last essay spoke about breaking the silence around the invisible women in the Orthodox Church experiencing spousal violence and how we need accountable theology to stop the promotion of the notion that domestic violence is a cross to bear—but that both are essential but insufficient measures of redress. Here I probe […]
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Maternal Body
by Carrie Frederick Frost About a decade ago I found myself pregnant with triplets halfway through work on a PhD in theology at the University of Virginia. My husband and I had thought long and hard about having a third child, so the joke was on us when—to our total surprise—we learned at a routine […]