From author, theologian, professor--and recent Axia webinar presenter--Carrie Frederick Frost:
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I wanted to write in the wake of the Axia blog posts about my book.
My experience of this book was not that it wrote itself—it was not easy to write it—but that I had to write it; I was compelled to write it because I love my church and I felt that the issues laid out in the book were not being comprehensively addressed elsewhere. I felt that one book on women in the Orthodox church that clearly laid out the situation was needed.
So I felt compelled to write it and I felt that it was important to put the big picture of women in the Orthodox Church today, but this does not mean I understand the book to be the final word on women in the church.
I’ve been asked about the specific hopes I have for the book, how I hope it will be received, and what it might achieve. Really my main hope for the book was that it would generate conversation, that we would talk about these things, and that more voices other than my own would join and carry on this conversation. In no way do I see my own voice as definitive or final.
So, you can imagine just how delightful it was that four faithful Orthodox women read my book and responded to it from their own perspectives. For me, this was a development of the type of conversation around women in the church that I had hoped would come out of the book! All is this to say that it’s incredibly gratifying to continue the conversation about women and the church together.
To speak specifically the four blog posts—they were absolutely fantastic. It struck me that each one was, in one way or another, about questions we have heard asked or we ask ourselves about women in the church.
Laura and Mariane both recounted stories of questions:
"Why can’t girls be priests?"
"Why do men receive communion first?"
Both Laura and Marianne convey to us how important it is that we have good answers around issues of women in the church--and how we often don't have good answers or how poor answers can arise from poor practices that need to be addressed.
Both Marika and Rachel addressed what I think are central questions at the intersection of theology and practice.
Marika – "Why do we do the things we do, and do these things make sense, are they right and true?"
Rachel—"How do we do theology? How do we and how should we experience and live our our lives as the church today?"
These questions are *the* questions of the church today--around women and around other matters--and we need to be able to answer or at least grapple with them, so I was so pleased to see Marika and Rachel raise and wrestle with them.
I feel that each writer responded to my work in a wonderful and meaningful way but also quite brilliantly responded to the larger questions in the Orthodox Church today. I don't have the right words to convey how much their responses meant to me.
One final thought -- chills ran up and down my spine when Marianne quoted CS Lewis's Screwtape Letters. I consider that book the best theological mediation on the human condition of the twentieth century. I dearly love chapter 15, from which Marianne quoted, and I am going to inflict my love of it on you by pasting in the full passage below. On that note, I thank them all sincerely for the "present pleasure" they have given me by engaging with my book and with our church so thoughtfully and so beautifully.
The present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience that [God] has of reality as a whole. In it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned with either eternity, which means being concerned with him, or the present. Either meditating on their eternal union with or separation from himself or else obeying the present voice of conscience bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.
C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters
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Carrie Frederick Frost is the Chair of Saint Phoebe Center for the Deaconess, and a scholar of modern Orthodox Christianity who teaches at Western Washington University and Saint Sophia Ukrainian Orthodox Seminary. Her organizational skills are legendary, such that she was not only a founding board member of the International Orthodox Theological Association and was one of the key organizers of its January 2023 mega-conference.
Dr. Frost’s areas of special focus are women and mothers in the church, sacraments and practice, Christian material culture, and contemplative prayer. In the aftermath of Holy and Great Council in Crete, she was invited by the Greek Archdiocese to edit a book of reactions from women as part of the reception of the Council, which came out as The Reception of the Holy and Great Council: Reflections of Orthodox Christian Women. Her books about women that combine a deep pastoral sensibility with sound theology, clear-eyed realism, and a profound love of the Church.