By Loretta Fulton

The public is invited to hear a professor of classics at Cornell University speak on Can Early Christianity’s Lost Women Ever Be Found? during two Carmichael-Walling lectures at Abilene Christian University  on Thursday, Nov. 5.

The lectures, which are free, will begin at 4 and 7 p.m. in Room 114 of the Biblical Studies building on the ACU campus. To stream the lectures, register here.

Guest speaker will be Dr. Nicola Denzey Lewis, a Canadian academic and prominent historian of early Christianity, specializing in the social history of the late Roman Empire. She recently joined Cornell University as professor of classics.

Denzey Lewis has a particular expertise in the social history of women in formative Christianity from the New Testament world into late antiquity, working to uncover the lives of real women with a variety of strategies from textual analysis to archaeology, visual, and material cultures.

Dr. Nicola Denzey Lewis

The schedule follows:

4 p.m.–The Mysterious Magdalene, Covert Co-Workers, and Other Obscure Ladies of the New Testament World
This lecture will introduce a skeptic’s view of women’s agency in the first century, revisiting what we know — and don’t know — about the famous women of the New Testament.

7 p.m.–Women on the Margins: Christian Matrons and their Worlds from the Second to the Fourth Centuries
This lecture will explore and characterize upper-class Christian women in their contexts of life and work in the first few centuries of Christianity.

Loretta Fulton is creator and editor of Spirit of Abilene