Description
🏆 2021 BIBA® Non-Fiction: Religion/Spiritual Winner!
Does the History of Early Christianity adequately include the voice of its women leaders and wise elders? VK McCarty’s new book, From Their Lips: Voices of Early Christian Women (Gorgias Press, 2021), steps forward to begin to fill the gap with engrossing vitas of several women who were remembered following the command of Christ in the Early Church. Beginning with Paul’s co-worker Lydia encountered in the Book of Acts, McCarty brings to life the ministry and teaching of a dozen prominent women from the early centuries of Christianity who are textually represented in the New Testament, the Greek Fathers and other ancient sources. The life of Paul’s partner in preaching from the apocryphal Acts, Thekla, is explored as she navigates the call of the Holy Spirit and persecution at the hands of Roman authorities—and well as her sister-martyr, Perpetua, author of the first autobiographical text written by a woman in Latin. Among the Desert Fathers, one of the three women included in The Sayings of the Fathers is Amma Syncletica, whose voice is clearly attested in practical and wise teachings about Prayer and Desert Wisdom. St. John Chrysostom’s soul-mate, the Deaconess Olympia, St. Theodore the Studite spiritual daughter, the Abbess Kassia both speak from the Great Church in Constantinople. VK McCarty lectures on Ascetical Theology at General Theological Seminary in New York City, where she served as Acquisitions Librarian for 15 years. Her published work focuses on Early Christian women and Byzantine Studies.
V K McCarty
