‘Feminism, Faith, and Divine Otherness’: Ashley Purpura Discusses Year-long Project at Harvard Divinity School

Ashley Purpura, MTS ’09, has long hoped to delve into a deep assessment of women and feminism within the Orthodox church. Her time as a 2023-24 research associate at the Women’s Studies in Religion Program (WSRP) at Harvard Divinity School has served as the culmination of that interest. 

Her year-long project at the WSRP, “Liberating Orthodoxy: Feminism, Faith, and Divine Otherness,” looks to uncover the feminism that already rests in Orthodox women’s writings and theology. 

Purpura, who is also Visiting Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Theology at HDS, taught a course in fall 2023 that collaboratively dug into some of these texts in order to better situate the ways in which women are both empowered and limited within their Orthodox context.

Below, Purpura discusses uncovering Orthodox women’s theological insights, her academic background and scholarly journey, and teaching a class “I wish I could have taken” while a student at HDS. 

Intellectual and Professional Background   

I'm an Associate Professor at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana, and I've been there for just about 10 years now. I'm appointed in their religious studies program, in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, which is in the College of Liberal Arts.   

As a teenager I really liked reading a lot, and my mom had an amazing book collection with a lot of religious books. During the summers, I would read about Orthodox saints and history and some theology. Then, when I went to undergrad at Florida State University, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I majored in international affairs, but almost all the classes I took to fulfill that degree were religious studies courses. So, I double majored in religious studies. When I graduated, I felt like I just wasn't done with the study of religion—or maybe it wasn't done with me yet.  

So, I applied to master's programs, and I got into Harvard Divinity School. I loved my time here as a student. I did some coursework across the Boston Theological Interreligious Consortium, and I focused on the history of Christianity and Judaism. The classes were wonderful, but I wanted to study women and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. 

I remember talking to my faculty advisor, and I said, “I think I maybe want to do systematics. I want to do something a little bit more constructive and respond to issues I see in my tradition.” And he replied, “Within Orthodox Christianity, History of Christianity is going to help you get to address the questions you want.” He was right, because Orthodoxy is very much grounded in tradition, there’s a lineage and heritage that shapes how we interpret the present.  

After completing my master’s degree, I applied for a PhD program, and I went to Fordham University. This was a great environment to focus my interests in Orthodox history and theology. I wrote my dissertation on hierarchy, which became the topic for my first book, God, Hierarchy, and Power: Orthodox Theologies of Authority from Byzantium, but that project didn’t directly focus on my interest in Orthodox women’s lives and perspectives. It took up questions related to women’s place and experience in the church, but in a way that looked at bigger issues of theological understandings and of authority and hierarchy overall in Orthodox tradition. After all, gender and power are very much entangled.

Developing Scholarship on Women in Orthodoxy 

In recent years, I felt I finally had the space and freedom to study women in Orthodoxy. In 2020-21, I received a National Endowment for the Humanities faculty fellowship in Orthodox Christian Studies through Fordham to work on a book about what we should do with a historically patriarchal tradition that is mostly written and controlled by men. 

Even the records we have of women saints are filtered through an androcentric lens, or women are represented in a patriarchally controlled liturgical context. During this fall, I was able to spend time finishing revisions on that book, which is now titled, Women in the Orthodox Tradition: Feminism, Theology, and Equality. It will be published in 2025 by the University of Notre Dame Press. 

I was accepted for the WSRP appointment for my third book project, “Liberating Orthodoxy,” that finally deals with a constructive and more systematic reflection on Orthodox women’s theological insights. In this project, I ask: “How do women see themselves in their faith in a way that's liberatory?” 

On the one hand, there are some Orthodox women who see their position in a gender hierarchy as a fulfilling and meaningful part of their religious existence. But there are other women who write about how they understand God to be on their behalf in a way that prompts them to say, “I'm an Orthodox feminist.” In many contexts, this was (and for some, still is) considered an oxymoron.   

Part of what I'm doing in this project is saying, first we should reconsider what counts as theology and who counts as a theologian. The Orthodox tradition reflects theological insights coming from all sorts of diverse people, experiences, and sources. It is much more than just an academic or clerical genre or discipline; it is very much tied to one’s relationship with God and reflective of God at work in human lives.

Something I am doing in this project is focusing on what twentieth-century women find to be liberating in their theological tradition and how they see God working on their behalf to subvert patriarchal oppression. I ask, what resources can we draw on from both women's writings and the greater theological tradition of Orthodoxy that support women’s equality and liberation? 

Research and Discovery 

I am very excited to have this time to devote to this project. In the fall of 2023, I researched modern Orthodox women's writings and reflections to see if there might be some common themes among them. Some of these women have PhDs or have other theological training and have been formally recognized in the church or academy. Some are priests’ wives, lay ministers, and lay participants in their community who are just thinking about what God means to them in a way that is deeply theological.

In regard to my research process, it is largely library work focused more historically rather than interviewing human participants. Although, because I'm an Orthodox Christian surrounded by that environment, it is in some ways reflective of, and limited by, my own experience and women that I know.   

An important observation I have made is that Orthodox lay people are not as impressed with academic credentials as much as how you reflect holiness in your life. We have these virtues of sacrifice and humility, so one problem is that when women try to advocate for themselves, it is seen as being prideful. 

There is still a value given to suffering as redemptive or spiritually formative in a way that makes you more Christ-like, which is problematic if you are trying to advocate for any type of change. 

Orthodoxy is also often considered to be unchanging, and indeed does pride itself on continuity with tradition. So then, how do I show that these values, which one might call feminist, are already deeply within Orthodoxy? 

The word “feminist” is very polarizing within the church. There are all these connotations with power, social values, and culture that make any overt feminist theology a problem for many Orthodox Christians, and so it is a matter of working within the tradition to see what resources are already there that can be used to show the already extant Orthodox theology that affirms equality in diversity and liberation from oppression.  

Teaching at HDS and Feeling Energized by the Community 

In the fall, I taught “Women, Power, and Freedom in Orthodox Christian Thought.” It’s a course I wish I could have taken when I was a student. I always wanted to take a class on Orthodox women. We did have male authors on the syllabus, but it was a course where we really focused on women's writings, voices, and even the construction of women. 

HDS students are really wonderful. I had some Orthodox students and some non-Orthodox students, but they all could really relate and be sympathetic to the type of challenges that women face in this very historically patriarchal context. However, we also had a lot of conversations about Orthodox grandmothers and women who are possibly running the churches behind-the-scenes: doing the day-to-day or passing the faith on to their children.   

This spring, the goal has been to get a full draft of the new book by the end of my appointment and carrying a little bit into the summer. It is a lot of writing and thinking, and it has been great to have the other WSRP research associates offer feedback on some chapters. 

We are all coming from different disciplines, but we are very supportive of each other's projects. It has been a really nice environment to be in. 

In our progress meetings, someone always raises the question, “Who is your audience?” It is very easy for me to get very insular—writing to an Orthodox community—so it is helpful to have colleagues in other traditions to help me think and write a bit more broadly. I’m so impressed by reading parts of their projects, too.  

In some ways, this has been just the most energizing and precious time to be a part of this community, to research, but also to interact with students who are in my research area. Next spring, I'll be back to teaching and the writing will slow down, but this has given me such a good opportunity to really dive deep into the thinking and the research that I'll just be revising at that point. It has been a really wonderful experience, and I’m so grateful to have been part of the HDS community again for the year!  

—Interview conducted and edited by Rachel Mallett, HDS news correspondent