May 24, 2022 at 8:00pm EDT

Women Erased: New Evidence for Female Clerics in the Early Church

Join Professor Patel as we explore her research showing that in the early church, women served clerical roles as ordained ministers called deacons and presbyters, both subordinate to the higher-ranking bishops.

Scholars agree that we should think of Christianities in the plural when we think of the era of Christian origins. There was never one Christianity, in other words. Women’s clerical leadership, likewise, spanned a range from women being thought of as prophetic mouthpieces for Christ himself to being relegated to silence during worship. In this talk, we’ll explore evidence supporting women’s clerical leadership from lesser-known sources and some of the ways we moderns have sought to erase this evidence in order to advance the idea of a coherent Christianity stretching back to the apostolic age. From manuscript variants, to prophetic utterings, to the stories of women martyrs and “monks,” we’ll survey the various ways women could occupy leadership roles in ancient Christianities and consider the role of history inshaping the present.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/recovering-the-female-clerics-of-the-early-church/

Shaily Patel is assistant professor of early Christianity in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on the diversity of early Christianity and how discourses of magic helped solidify Christian group identities. Currently, she is working on a book called Smoke and Mirrors: Discourses of Magic in Early Petrine Traditions.

June 7, 2022 at 8:00pm EDT

Women Erased: "The Forbidden Call" Screening and Conversation with AnaMichele Morejon and Diane Whelan

Join filmmaker, AnaMichele Morejon, and Roman Catholic Womenpriest, Diane Whelan, for this special screening of the short documentary, The Forbidden Call, with conversation to follow.

From the director's note:

My journey with THE FORBIDDEN CALL began with curiosity. I was born and raised in the Catholic Church. Growing up in a generation increasingly disillusioned with organized religion, I have always had questions, and that continued into college. As a film and theology student at Loyola Marymount University, I was researching the topic of women’s ordination when stumbled upon the movement, Roman Catholic Women Priests (RCWP). I was shocked.

I am a woman who has never felt represented or understood in a Church led by a celibate, male priesthood. I found a ray of hope in RCWP, and I hope others do, too. RCWP ordains women to a renewed, more inclusive vision of priesthood. They minister to those often rejected by the institutional church, such as those who are divorced without an annulment and the LGBTQ+ community.

THE FORBIDDEN CALL confronts a Church that shuts down dialogue on women’s ordination to the priesthood. Women like Diane have so much to offer. I hope that the film encourages viewers to reflect on the unique gifts of every human being and what it means to truly love others. The film is a poignant reminder that change in the Catholic Church is long overdue, but Diane’s ministry is one step in the right direction.

AnaMichele Morejon is a filmmaker from South Florida who is fascinated by stories of people who challenge the norm. Her deep empathy for those alienated by mainstream society and love for character-driven narratives led her to study film at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. AnaMichele’s creative work explores themes at the intersection of identity, belief, and modern culture. Most recently, she directed the short, The Road to Sanctuary, which was released by Spirit Juice Studios, a multiple Emmy award-winning production company.

August 2 , 2022 at 8pm EDT

Women Erased: Women in Second Temple Judaism with Prof. Amy Jill Levine

The popular perception that Jesus was a first-century feminist amid a Judaism that made the Taliban look progressive is compelling for many women who seek from Jesus a message of liberation from patriarchy. This perception is also both historically inaccurate and theologically toxic. How can better historical work help us reconstruct the lives of first-century Jewish women, and how can this reconstruction in turn provide good news to women today?

Amy Jill Levine is Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University of Religion and Peace and University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita, and Professor of New Testament Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt. Her publications include The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi; six children’s books (with Sandy Sasso); The Gospel of Luke (with Ben Witherington III, the first biblical commentary by a Jew and an Evangelical); The Jewish Annotated New Testament (co-edited with Marc Brettler), TheBible With and Without Jesus: How Jews and Christians Read the Same Stories Differently (with Marc Brettler), The Pharisees (co-edited with Joseph Sievers), and thirteen edited volumes of the Feminist Companions to the New Testament and Early Christian Literature. Along with Introduction to the Old Testament for the Teaching Company, her study guides include Sermon on the Mount: A Beginner’s Guide to the Kingdom of Heaven; Light of the World: A Beginner’s Guide to Advent, The Difficult Words of Jesus: A Beginner’s Guide to His Most Perplexing Teachings, and Witness at the Cross: A Beginner’s Guide to Holy Week. The first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, AJ describes herself as an unorthodox member of an Orthodox synagogue and a Yankee Jewish feminist who seeks to correct anti-Jewish, sexist, andother harmful interpretations of the Bible.

June 28, 2022 at 12:00 Noon EDT

TalkUP Tuesday: Dark Money in the Catholic Church with Brian Fraga of the National Catholic Reporter

National Catholic Reporter’s Brian Fraga will join us to speak on the web of “dark money” flowing from conservative and right wing sources to Catholic organizations in the United States. Several of these same donors have also funneled money to far-right groups that the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League have described as white nationalist organizations. Some of those recipients worked to spread false information about election fraud and were involved in planning demonstrations that preceded the Jan. 6, 2021, assault at the United States Capitol.

Brian Fraga is a staff reporter at National Catholic Reporter. He covers news pertaining to the Catholic Church in the United States. He was previously a contributing editor at Our Sunday Visitor and has written for a variety of Catholic publications over the last decade. Brian was also a reporter for daily newspapers in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and New Mexico. He lives in Fall River, Massachusetts, with his wife Catherine and their daughter Hope.

July 19, 2022 at 12noon EDT

TalkUP Tuesday: The Crisis of Catholic Communication with David Gibson

David Gibson, longtime Catholic journalist and currently director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, discusses his recent National Catholic Reporter article on the decision by the USCCB to shutter Catholic News Service and what it says about their financial priorities, their pastoral priorities, and the entire project of evangelization and communications.

David Gibson was appointed the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham in July 2017, coming to New York’s Jesuit university after a long career as an award-winning religion journalist, author and filmmaker. He’s also a convert to Catholicism, and came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, working at the English Program at Vatican Radio in Rome in the late 1980s. He returned to the United States in 1990 and worked for newspapers in the New York area and has written for a variety of magazines and periodicals. He is the author of two books on Catholicism: The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism, and The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World. Before coming to Fordham, Gibson workedfor six years as a national reporter at Religion News Service specializing in coverage of the Vatican and the Catholic Church. Gibson is a frequent media commentator and op-ed writer on topics related to the Catholic Church and religion in America.

Celebrate!

Celebrate the life of Sr. Thea Bowman with your community! Download our Women Witnesses for Racial Justice Resource!

Sr. Thea Bowman radically changed the church as a Black Woman Religious who knew both God and her people.  She spoke bodly to bishops and seekers alike.  This prophet of God was born on December 29, 1937.  As we celebrate her birth and her life , let's share her wisdom and her indomitable Spirit.

Take Action!

Celebrate the Holy Family: End Subordination in the Catholic Church

Lectionary readings that explicitly promote subordination of women and still authorize slavery should be excluded from our liturgical life.

It is tragic, even scandalous, that in the 21st century, the Catholic Church, which incorporates the transformative wisdom of the Second Vatican Council along with a challenging and robust catalogue of Catholic Social Teaching, continues to subject Catholics to lectionary texts that explicitly encourage the subordination of women and enslaved peoples. Yet, these exhortations are part of our Sunday and weekday readings -- teachings that Catholics hear and assimilate.

Learn more from our educational resource and find downloadable letters for the USCCB Committee on Divine Liturgy and for your bishop, priest, and local newspapers.

Please join our campaign to reform the Catholic Lectionary today!

In Celebration of Women Witnesses for Racial Justice

Celebrate the life of Sr. Thea Bowman with your community! Download our Women Witnesses for Racial Justice Resource!

Sr. Thea Bowman radically changed the church as a Black Woman Religious who knew both God and her people.  She spoke bodly to bishops and seekers alike.  This prophet of God was born on December 29, 1937.  As we celebrate her birth and her life , let's share her wisdom and her indomitable Spirit.

Take Action!

Celebrate the Holy Family: End Subordination in the Catholic Church

Lectionary readings that explicitly promote subordination of women and still authorize slavery should be excluded from our liturgical life.

It is tragic, even scandalous, that in the 21st century, the Catholic Church, which incorporates the transformative wisdom of the Second Vatican Council along with a challenging and robust catalogue of Catholic Social Teaching, continues to subject Catholics to lectionary texts that explicitly encourage the subordination of women and enslaved peoples. Yet, these exhortations are part of our Sunday and weekday readings -- teachings that Catholics hear and assimilate.

Learn more from our educational resource and find downloadable letters for the USCCB Committee on Divine Liturgy and for your bishop, priest, and local newspapers.

Please join our campaign to reform the Catholic Lectionary today!

Women Erased: Women's Authority under Complementarianism with Dr. Beth Allison Barr

Dr. Beth Allison Barr states that the reason we think women cannot be in authority is simply because we've taken five or six verses from the New Testament and we have used those verses and read the entire Bible through them, through that lens. And these are mostly the Pauline verses: women be silent, women submit to your husbands, etc. If we step away from those verses and actually put them in the context of what Paul was doing — and then put that in the context of the entire Bible — what we see is that while patriarchy exists in the Bible, that God is actually always fighting against patriarchy, that he's always raising women out of it. He's always giving women authority in surprising ways, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. And that if we look at the historical context of what Paul is actually doing in the New Testament, there are serious problems with reading Paul as telling women that they have to be silent and under the authority of men for all times.

In her new book, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth, historian Beth Allison Barr traces cultural sources of patriarchy that have all but erased women's historical importance as leaders of the faith.

Barr is a Southern Baptist and a pastor's wife. In an interview with NPR, she described the day she realized that "what we found in the Bible about what women were supposed to do did not match with what my church was saying women were supposed to do." Eventually, she and her husband left that congregation — no longer able to tolerate the contradictions, she said.