The St Nina Quarterly - bibliography included

Ecumenical Review, The, Jan, 2001 by Teva Regule

Bringing Together a Community of Orthodox Christian Women

As Orthodox Christians we believe that human beings -- men and women -- are created in the image and likeness of God. Because we also believe in the Trinity, a divine community of Persons, we believe that in order to be truly human, we must be community. As Sister Nonna Harrison states in her article, "The Holy Trinity as a Model for Human Community",

   ... to be made in the image of God is to be made in the image of the Holy
   Trinity; like the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, human beings are
   persons. This means that we are free and are able to know and love others,
   but it also means that our belonging to the community of humankind, our
   relatedness to other people, is at the very root of who we are.

      This provides a model for the ideal human community, in which people are
   united by mutual love, they work together in harmonious consensus, and the
   equality and dignity of each person is respected.(1)

What a beautiful and life-giving understanding of the human community and our part in it! Throughout history many women have played an important role in helping to build and sustain the Christian community: the Virgin Mary who gave birth to Jesus the Christ; the myrrh-bearing women of the gospels who were the first disciples to witness to the risen Christ; and the many women saints who, throughout the ages, have used their gifts to proclaim the good news to the world.

We have a rich history of women's participation in the community of the church. Unfortunately, much of this history is not known to many Orthodox Christian women and men. Of course we worship the trinitarian God in the Divine Liturgy, but the God of "inter-relationship and shared love"(2) is sometimes hidden by practices that are more reflective of cultural biases and outdated understandings of women's participation in that shared love, than of the genuine theology of the church. As Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, a well-known French Orthodox theologian, has written about the reality of the church today:

   Here is juxtaposed and joined the liberating message of the gospel and
   archaic taboos, a theological anthropology both spiritual and personal, and
   the misogynistic stereotypes inherited from patriarchal societies.(3)

This has led many women who truly love God and his church to a sense of isolation and loss of connection with the church. As one of the readers of the St Nina Quarterly wrote:

   I thought I was the only person who felt as I did -- felt a piece of
   myself, of my faith missing in the Orthodox church. To know there are
   others who feel the same -- but are also doing something to find those
   missing pieces, the history that was never told to us as young women
   growing up in the church ...(4)

This sense of isolation and loss is hard to quantify precisely because it is so often experienced in isolation. In discussions with friends I have met through my work in the church, many of us admitted that, although we love Christ and his church, we sometimes experienced a similar sense of frustration and even loss. We agreed that we needed a vehicle that would enable us to share our thoughts and feelings as women in the church, to study the faith, and ultimately to find our salvation within the church as members of the community of believers. There were others who did not necessarily share our feelings of frustration or loss, but who thought that a journal focusing on women in the Orthodox church was needed. It was at that time that the first seeds of what was to become the St Nina Quarterly were planted.

We started as a small group of women who, through friendship and a growing women's network, had found one another. Some had known each other for years and others were meeting for the first time. Many of us had studied at seminary and had earned advanced degrees in theology. However, few were working in the church in a capacity for which they were trained. Also, we soon discovered that, because the Orthodox church in North America is grouped primarily along ethnic lines, our contact and communication with one another had been limited at best. Therefore, the journal would not only need to explore the ministry of women in the church, but would also need to include the experiences of all Orthodox women, regardless of ethnic group or jurisdiction. We sought the assistance of several well-respected Orthodox theologians -- both women and men -- of various dioceses and jurisdictions. They eventually became our honorary advisory board. So, with a sense of mission, hope and, admittedly, little money, the St Nina Quarterly was born.

The late 3rd-century St Nina is known as the Enlightener of the Georgians. Because of the extent and nature of her missionary work, the church has given her the title, Equal to the Apostles. We chose her as our patron and namesake because of the example she set in heeding the call to preach the gospel.

Selecting a patron saint proved to be much easier than defining and describing our mission. Although the task of explaining our purpose fully, yet succinctly, seemed daunting at first, we were finally able to put down in words our beliefs and mission for the journal: