Women and Ordination in the Orthodox Church: A Conversation with Gabrielle Thomas and Elena Narinskaya

The Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University presents the next episode of its webinar series highlighting the scholarly insights and academic careers of female scholars whose research and writing explore some facet of the history, thought, or culture of Orthodox Christianity. The broadcast will be livestreamed and open to all who have pre-registered. The event will include some time for live audience questions. For those who miss the live event, the center will archive each episode on its website and YouTube channel.

This episode features an interview with Gabrielle Thomas and Elena Narinskaya.

Elena Narinskaya, Ph.D., is the Spalding Research Fellow in comparative religion at Cambridge University. Her main research interest lies is in the area of scriptural studies/biblical exegesis within the context of three monotheistic religions (i.e., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). She has previously worked with early Jewish-Christian interpretations of Exodus in fourth-century Syria and Palestine and published her first book on the basis of her Ph.D. in 2010. Since then, she has researched the Qur’anic presentation of the Exodus stories. She recently submitted her third monograph to Rutledge on the stories of Moses in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources. She studied Judaism and Hebrew in Jerusalem from 1999 to 2000, and completed an M.A. program at the Centre for Jewish-Christian Relations in Cambridge in 2002. She also studied Syriac language and Syriac Christian tradition of biblical exegesis in Cambridge. At Durham University, she completed her doctorate in Biblical Exegesis in Syria and Palestine in 2007, which was followed by a postdoctoral licentiate in divinity from the University of Wales, Lampeter (2008 to 2011). She also studied Arabic and Tafsir Qur’an at Durham University and in Alexandria, Egypt. From 2012 to 2015, she held a research position at the Centre for Muslim-Christian Studies in Oxford, where she worked on her third monograph. For the 2015-2016 academic year, she moved to Dublin City University in Ireland where she worked on creating the Centre for Interreligious Dialogue. From October 2017 through Aug 2018, she was working on her fourth monograph at Clare Hall, Cambridge University as the Spalding Research Fellow. For the academic year, 2017-2018, she was invited to Ruhr-Universität Bochum as an academic research fellow. Since December 2018, she has been an associate member of the theology department at the University of Oxford.

Gabrielle Thomas, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of early Christianity and Anglican studies at Emory University. In addition to authoring a significant number of journal articles, book chapters, and reviews, she has published three books: The Image of God in the Theology of Gregory Nazianzus (monograph, Cambridge, 2019), Women and Ordination in the Orthodox Church: Explorations in Theology and Practice (co-edited, Cascade, 2020), and For the Good of the Church: Unity, Theology, and Women (monograph, SCM Press, 2021). An ordained priest in the Church of England, she has served churches as both a lay and an ordained leader. As a committed ecumenist, she serves on the Anglican and Oriental Orthodox International Commission.