In this article, I examine the reasons that C. S. Lewis, a Christian apologist, Anglican layman, and medieval scholar, used to argue against women as Anglican priests, as well as the traditions articulated by Vatican councils that block women from the priesthood of the Roman Catholic Church. I will begin with Lewis and show how his reasons relate to those of the Catholic hierarchy, who do not use selected passages from the epistles to confine the priesthood to males, but rather the maleness of Christ and twelve of his disciples.

The purpose of this article is to examine the oldest surviving iconographic artifacts that depict early Christians in real churches at the Eucharist table. These provide the oldest visual evidence of early Christian traditions of leadership as it was actually practiced in churches. The reason for doing this is to fill in the cultural gaps about what we know regarding the sex of leaders who performed the ritual, or liturgy.

I want to begin this morning with a story about my family, a story about my sister and me. My sister is younger than me, and I’m proud of her. Well, most of the time. I’m usually an awesome big sister, and I brag on her until I drive people crazy, but every once in a while, I get a little more jealous than I’d like to admit. This story happened on a Mother’s Day weekend. My dad gathered my sister, brother, and me on the Friday night before Mother’s Day.

Song of Songs is filled with subtle but powerful metaphors and motifs that teach about the beauty, power, and nature of erotic love, as well as various abuses of erotic love (including social prejudice, patriarchal control and double standards, machismo, undue haste in sexual relationships, and infidelity). Furthermore, I affirm the notion common among many readers through the centuries who champion the possibility of spiritually uplifting analogies between human erotic love and divine-human relationships.

Journals serve to advance academic and professional disciplines. Typically, the field of inquiry that a journal is seeking to advance is evident from its title. Colleagues of mine have, for example, recently published articles in the Journal of Physiology and the American Journal of Occupational Therapy.

Catherine Kroeger, the founding president of Christians for Biblical Equality, stated, “although women had made forays into the field of biblical interpretation, it was to be Katharine Bushnell who would bring out the heavy artillery.”¹ Mimi Haddad, current president of CBE, has bolstered Kroeger’s words with the claim that “Bushnell is to egalitarians what Luther was to the Reformation.”² Why is Bushnell thought of so highly?

 A law is only effective if it is implemented, even as a church’s position on theological issues does not further its mission if there is no corresponding practice. In 1986, the Mar Thoma Church officially stated that there is no theological barrier to ordaining both men and women to serve the church. However, there are currently no ordained females within the global Mar Thoma Church. Why is there such a dissonance between doctrine and praxis?

A thread woven throughout the ministry and teaching of Jesus is the in-breaking of the kingdom of God. Prominently, God’s kingdom brings dynamic implications: healing for the sick, liberation for the subjugated, and joy to the dejected (e.g., Luke 4:18–19). In short, the kingdom of God reorients the way of life. This article will consider how the coming of the kingdom of God provides “an alternative ordering of society”¹ regarding women in community and leadership.

The embodiment of Christ is central to the Christian faith as we confess God incarnate. The second person of the Trinity taking on flesh is integral to how we understand the means of our salvation—that Christ, fully God and fully human, died and was resurrected. We remember Christ’s broken body and shed blood for our salvation in the celebration of the Eucharist, a tangible practice that unites and sustains the body of Christ, the church.

In 2012, sixteen-year-old Amina Filali killed herself by ingesting rat poison after being forced to marry her rapist by the Moroccan judicial system.¹ While the situation might shock us, her response comes as no surprise since Amina would have shared the bed of her rapist for the rest of her life, giving him the “right” to repeat the initial act indefinitely. Sadly, such an arrangement is no stranger to ancient Israel’s law.