Orthodox Christianity and Gender

This collectiion investigates modern manifestations of Orthodox Christianity through an explicitly gender-sensitive gaze. By addressing attitudes to gender in this context, it fills major gaps in the literature on both religion and gender.

Helena Kupari is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Cultures, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, Finland. She has published a monograph entitled Lifelong Religion as Habitus: Religious Practice among Displaced Karelian Orthodox Women in Finland (2016) and has contributed chapters and articles on Religious Studies to various publications in the field. Elina Vuola is Professor of Global Christianity and Dialogue of Religions at the Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki, Finland. She has been a visiting scholar at the Women's Studies in Religion Program of the Harvard Divinity School (2002-2003) and at the Religious Studies Department at Northwestern University (2014-2015). She has written multiple chapters and articles and lectured widely on the interaction of gender and Orthodox Christianity. Her most recent monograph is The Virgin Mary across Cultures: Devotion among Costa Rican Catholic and Finnish Orthodox Women (2019).

1. Introduction -Helena Kupari and Elina Vuola; I Negotiating Tradition; 2. Gender and Orthodox Theology: Vistas and Vantage Points -Brian Butcher; 3. Women in the Church: Conceptions of Orthodox Theologians in Early Twentieth-Century Russia -Nadezhda Beliakova; 4. Obedient Artists and Mediators: Women Icon Painters in the Finnish Orthodox Church from the Mid-Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century-Katariina Husso; 5. What Has Not Been Assumed Has Not Been Redeemed: The Forgotten Orthodox Theological Condonement of Women's Ordination in the 1996 Orthodox and Old Catholic Consultation on Gender and the Apostolic Ministry- Peter-Ben Smit; II Lived Orthodoxy; 6. How to Ask Embarrassing Questions About Women's Religion: Menstruating Mother of God, Ritual Impurity, and Fieldwork Among Seto Women in Estonia and Russia-Andreas Kalkun; 7. Enshrining Gender: Orthodox Women and Material Culture in the United States- Sarah Riccardi-Swartz; 8. Tradition, Gender, and Empowerment: The Birth of Theotokos Society in Helsinki, Finland- Pekka Metso, Nina Maskulin, and Teuvo Laitila; III Crises and Gender; 9. Shaping Public Orthodoxy: Women's Peace Activism and the Orthodox Churches in the Ukrainian Crisis- Heleen Zorgdrager; 10. On Saints, Prophets, Philanthropists, and Anticlericals: Orthodoxy, Gender, and the Crisis in Greece- Eleni Sotiriou; 11. Russian Orthodox Icons of Chernobyl as Visual Narratives about Women at the Center of Nuclear Disaster- Elena Romashko