Women Erased: Recovering Women’s Leadership in the Early Church
Professor Shaily Patel joins FutureChurch for this “Women Erased” series presentation. After sharing her thoughts on the ethical considerations that historians must take into account, Professor Patel offers 3 case studies for models of female leadership in the early Church.
Shaily Patel is assistant professor of early christianity in the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech. She earned her PhD from The University of North Carolina in 2017 and holds master’s degrees from Vanderbilt Divinity School and The University of Chicago. Dr. Patel’s research and teaching is dedicated to complicating easy assertions about the past, and about past Christians in particular. She teaches courses in New Testament, Christian apocryphal texts, orthodoxy and heresy, and demonology and exorcism. In each of her courses, she emphasizes the variety of early Christian groups and their respective beliefs. She locates early Christians within their cultural contexts, demonstrating how these multiple Christianities converge with or diverge from their Graeco-Roman origins.