Valerie Karras,
Th.D., Ph.D.

Valerie Karras

Valerie Karras has always been interested in theology. After receiving a B.A. in Political Science from Washington University, she completed a Master's of Theological Studies at Holy Cross School of Theology and Th.D. in Greek patristics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She is currently a doctoral candidate in church history at the Catholic University of America, where she expects to complete her dissertation in December 1997. She has returned to two of her alma maters to teach courses in such areas as Byzantine history, Church history, and women's roles in ancient Greece and Rome, first as an adjunct lecturer at Washington University and then as an assistant professor at Holy Cross.

The very title of this year's annual meeting—“Invisible No More?”—speaks both to the backseat role which women historically have played within Christianity and, with its interrogative punctuation, to the uncertainty regarding our roles both present and future. The increasing attention being paid to the place of women in the Church is at once both a positive development in its reevaluation of long-held practices and yet a reminder of the limitations placed on women's active participation in the life of the Church. There has never been a similar discussion of the role of men within the Church for the simple reason that men have never been limited in their ecclesial participation.

…Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner. . . . So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken." (Gen. 2:18, 21-23 NRSV)

Valerie: First, I'd like to thank you, Fr. Harakas, for taking the time to be interviewed and for having agreed to serve on the honorary board of the St. Nina Quarterly. Your serving on our honorary board is particularly appropriate given your field of expertise. Relatively few Orthodox theologians and scholars have chosen to go into the field of ethics. What led you to choose to study ethics?

In the last issue, I dealt with Frank Schaeffer’s assertion:

[b]y ordaining women, “liberal” Protestants are in effect saying, “Christ did not come in the flesh, his maleness does not matter, he is a mere symbol of something larger.”