Katherine Karam McCray is our Woman of the Week, nominated for her work in disability theology. You see her with colleagues at a gathering of Orthodox ethics scholars for the Templeton-funded project "Science and Orthodoxy Around the World" at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. We asked her to tell you how she ended up working in such a specialized field:
“I am currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, specializing in religious ethics, and hold an MDiv from Princeton Theological Seminary and a ThM from St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. I serve on several special service boards, including as a consultant to the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops’ Mental Health Ministries. I most recently served as a researcher for the new Peace of Mind clergy and parish leaders’ training program, which provides a program called Mental Health First Aid within an Orthodox theological context. At the beginning of the pandemic, we also produced a mental health series. I chat with Bishop John and Dr. Al Rossi about mental health and Orthodox theology in the first video of the series, Mental Health and Orthodox Christianity.
“I’ve had the pleasure to be sort of an academic nomad, living in many locations across the country and being involved in parish life across jurisdictions. I am truly the product of layers and layers of other people’s influence. When I was an undergrad, I remember the stark contrast between how women scholars were treated in the Southern American classroom and how they operated in my parish. In my local community, it was the parish where women were the most free. Witnessing powerful women lead, teach, and inspire was deeply formative for me.
“I realize now what a special environment it was, but thankfully I have been in similar parishes my whole life. As I have moved across the US, and now internationally, I’ve been blessed to have a similar parish culture repeated, in Texas, Washington DC, New Jersey, New York and Toronto. The yiayas, tetas, and babas of my community disavowed me of any notion that women were not gifted leaders. We participate in a historical legacy maintained continuously from the Theotokos to present-day. These women shaped how I view my scholarly work as ministry. Parish life gave me a deep root-system, and I am so thankful for those roots in competitive academia.”
Axia!
Our Woman of the Week is Katherine Karam McCray, nominated for her work in disability theology. You see her here presenting "Complex-PTSD and the Orthodox Moral Tradition" for OCAMPR in 2019, and in discussion with Bp. John Abdalah and Dr. Rossi in the Assembly of Bishops' video series "Mental Health and Orthodox Christianity". We asked her to tell you more about what she has learned about human interdependence, our reliance on Christ, and how disabled people fit into our view of what it means to be human:
“In disability studies, ethnic and theological diversity isn’t well represented, so it takes a lot of strategizing to write Orthodox disability ethics. My work is highly intersectional, focusing on disability and constructions of the human person, so I have a foot in the faculty of theology and a foot in the philosophy department. I spend all my time explaining how interdependent and interwoven we are as human beings. If we could come to see that everything we are comes from the contributions from others, we could think differently about need. Need is how we become involved with one another. We graft together our choices from the opinions of others, we ask for advice, we seek affirmation—these are signs of our interdependency even when we think we are self-made. The decisions that we believe are our own are, in fact, the product of influence. We use our need as the impetus to initiate connection, and my work uses that connection as the way to describe human nature. We don’t need because we are weak or fallen—we need because dependency is a part of human nature. Our dependency on one another is an icon of our ultimate dependency on Christ. As creatures we have our starting place in Christ and we depend on his human nature for our own human nature, but we rarely stop to consider that this dependency is a sacred thing. Need initiates relationship.
“However, in North American life being independent is the goal, so we often hide the ways in which we are dependent. Women are made to conceal our layers, hiding our caregiving roles and the daily pressures of family life. We can be dependent insofar as it is hidden behind closed doors and private spaces, as long as we don’t need additional support from our workplaces or legal protections for those carer roles. The pandemic exposed just how much unseen labor women shoulder and how few infrastructures are in place to acknowledge our dependencies. But when suddenly schools were closed and people were working from home, all the hidden dependencies became obvious.
“My dissertation, entitled “The Unattainable Body,” emphasizes how our social myth of autonomy sets unattainable standards that alienate people with disabilities from what it means to be human. By participating in these myths, we construct societies that don’t plan for age, disease, or disability. Vulnerabilities in the human population are pushed away from sight to maintain the illusion that we are naturally autonomous. I argue that Orthodox anthropology offers an alternative. I reconstruct the classical description of human nature but instead of autonomy at the center, I emphasize dependency.”
As always, we asked Katherine Karam McCray, our Woman of the Week, to tell you about her morning routine. She is also sharing with you the place where she prays most often:
“I had been studying disability before having children, and I credit that grounding with my ability to be resilient after my eldest son experienced a rare form of meningitis and lost the ability to speak, walk, and care for himself. As he’s been gaining skills back over the course of several years, my morning routines have changed and shifted to accommodate medical appointments and clinical trials. Mornings are always unpredictable with children at home, and more so with a medically complex child, so my routine is always provisional.
“If my son has a seizure in his sleep, the whole household wakes up because we live in a tiny shoebox apartment. We have taken to imagining these disruptions as though they mark a monastic sleep pattern. We sleep for four hours, and then we are awake, we pray for help, we are confronted with our fragile bodies, and then we go back to sleep. At first, I thought my sleep loss would mean my productivity would crash, especially when I was studying for comprehensive exams, but I found the opposite. Because I research disability and interdependency, I’ve found living this unconventional life has opened me up creatively. When I get up for the day, I am aware of my body because I ache, I am still tired, and it requires effort to move. I have found, unexpectedly, a new depth and beauty in all the details of the morning.
“Right now, I am writing the last bits of my dissertation and I find such a profound meaning in the process of writing and researching disability. I still carry so many expectations of my body that ignore its limitations, but I am learning to value my own dependency. St. John Chrysostom says, ‘Need is our worthiness,’ and I feel that very deeply. Allowing my community to carry me has been a vulnerable, beautiful process that I wouldn’t trade for the world. It has made me bolder, knowing that I am deeply loved inside and through all my weaknesses.”
Thank you, Kate!
