Visual Record of Women in the Early Church

Sharifa >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Beyond Ordinary Women Podcast. I am your host for today, Sharifa Stevens, and I would like to introduce you to someone whom I admire.

Dr. Sandra Glahn is a journalist and also the author, coauthor or editor of more than 20 books. She serves as Professor of Media Arts and Worship at Dallas Theological Seminary. You can discover more about Dr. Glahn on our website, BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org.

Dr. Glahn’s most recent endeavor is the Visual Museum of Women in Christianity which we’re going to learn more about today. Welcome, Dr. Glahn.

Dr. Glahn >> Thank you so much. What a pleasure to see you.

Sharifa >> Well, it’s a pleasure to see you always.

I wanted to just jump in to questions about the Visual Museum of Women in Christianity because I’m a newbie to this subject, and I’m sure there would be plenty of people in the audience who are intrigued and want to know more. So let’s get started.

Dr. Glahn >> Let’s do it.

Sharifa >> How would you describe the museum to someone encountering it for the first time?

Dr. Glahn >> It’s a place to get free high quality photos of women and the history of the church, particularly the early church and Byzantine eras. Maybe in 4.0 we’ll be looking at every century of the church, but really it’s focused much more on women in the early church.

And it’s a resource with free downloads where you don’t have to ask permission. You don’t have to say where you got it. Everything is a work for hire with photographers so that women are much more easy, much more easily accessed if you want to include visuals with a presentation. What we found, well, there’s probably more than you need it just for a short explanation, but

Sharifa >> no.

Dr. Glahn >> we found that when we were looking to add women to PowerPoints and talks and people were looking for them for sermons, they’re hidden behind paywalls. The art was paywalled or it was clipart.

So it was one extreme or the other, the really high quality stuff. You know, it was illegal. If it was if it was even there. And so this is an effort to make it super accessible.

Sharifa >> When you say early church, just for those of us who might not have a clear timeline of the Byzantine era, what are the years that we’re talking about?

Dr. Glahn >> So early church, of course, begins with actually with the women of the Gospels. Well, right after Pentecost, but we’re including some women in the Bible as well. For example, there’s a whole section of Jesus’ mother. But really, then we’re probably looking through maybe the first through seventh, eighth, ninth centuries before you get into full on medieval, which, you know, there are actually set years, you know, but roughly the first 500 years of the church and then maybe a little beyond.

Sharifa >> Okay. Thank you.

So what are some examples of women who have been overlooked in church history, but whom you found in the visual record? And why do you think women’s contributions to Christian history have been so consistently overlooked or under-visualized?

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah. Well, first of all, I’m in the Protestant tradition. This this site is, of course, for anyone. But one thing that we notice in church history, especially in the Protestant tradition, is that because Protestants don’t believe in sainthood, they believe the by the New Testament does teach that every believer in Christ is a saint. So we Protestants, you know, took that hyper- literally and got rid of all mention of saints, except the ones of the good parties.

You know, we kept Saint Nicholas. We kept we kept, say, Valentine, we kept Saint Patrick. We could name their feast days but it’s true in general.

Sharifa >> St. Patrick

Dr. Glahn >> Exactly. But the church in the past had a feast day is the day that you graduate to heaven. So it’s not your birthday. It’s the day that you die. And many times, like Martin Luther in, you know, the 1500s he’s born in the late 1400s he’s named Martin because his baptism day, which is going to be in infancy, is the feast of Martin of Tours.

So you’re often named for the saint whose day you’re born on. And so people would know immediately, oh, you’re born in April. You’re born in September. By your name.

But what that meant was when we quit talking about the Saints, we lost the biographies. And so instead of learning, oh, today is the feast of Saint Thekla. Today is the feast day of Saint Putensiana or Praxedes or Priscilla or Agnes.

We lost them completely. And but the visual record has them. And what I mean by the visual record is anything in frescoes, in the mosaics, in the statues.

Actually, something else that we are tracing is even church names. The name Thekla, the church in Milan today the big, beautiful Duomo Cathedral in Milan is built on top of the Church of Thekla, which for more than a thousand years bore the name of a woman.

You have the same thing in Florence, which is built on top of the foundations of the church for Saint Reparata. And this is a name, right, that I’d never heard of but this is a name that is known to everyone in Florence. And for again, more than a thousand years, the church bears her name. So just if you look at the architecture of the early church, you’re going to find multiple women’s names.

If you go to Venice 1.0, before they move to the current island, because the island they were on, which is Torcello was sinking. So they had to go to an island they thought was not sinking. The Church of Santa Fosca is still there, still operating from the six or seven hundreds. And again, Fosca is not a name that most Protestants at least know. And she’s an early martyr.

Sharifa >> Okay. So it sounds like Protestants in our zeal for sola scriptura kind of left behind some of our, not kind of, we left behind some of our history

Dr. Glahn >> Exactly right.

Sharifa >> in that pursuit. So your visual record is also kind of a reclamation of

Dr. Glahn >> It is completely a reclamation of lost history.

If you look at some of the Catholic liturgy, these Agnus, all of these names are said every week in the high Holy Communion. So there are at least names that are known in the Catholic tradition because—and the Orthodox with a capital O, in these traditions, because there’s an acknowledgment of saints, they know whose feast day it is today.

And you have nuns as well. So even though there are not women in the priesthood. There are not women officiating at communion. You still have a pretty hefty visual, both living and dead tradition of women in the church.

We have no parallel to nuns in the Protestant church. And then we got rid of the names of the Saints. And so we really, we very often hear and I still hear it all the time. We hear a narrative that it really started with Betty Friedan and the second wave feminists. And up until then, there really weren’t women leading in the church.

Because our men who were trained in seminary in the 1930s, forties, fifties, they didn’t get the names of the saints or the women. And so they’ve never heard of them and are exposed to them. So we can feel in the public memory like it’s a new thing when you start mentioning women, particularly in the Protestant church.

Sharifa >> Mm. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Why do you think these names are important? Why are we going back for them?

<p>Dr. Glahn >> Oh, for lots of reasons.Let me just give an example of a retreat. I did a couple of weeks ago where I was talking about some of these women telling the story of the martyrs, telling the story of Agnes and Agatha and Apollonia. These names we just don’t know and they’re amazing stories of faith. And a young woman who was 17 came to me and said, that is the first time I have ever heard of women spoken of in the faith in any context other than aspiring to be a wife and mother.

That is a high holy calling, but I thought it was the only calling. And yet you have women who are benefactors. You have women who are bone collectors. So a bone collector in the early church is someone who is going and collecting the body parts of the martyrs and giving them a decent burial—in the same way that our militaries, you know, want to go get the dead and give them a burial to honor them.

You don’t just want them decaying. I mean, it’s dishonorable it’s devastating to the families. And part of this is because the Christian faith is rooted in physicality. Unlike some other faiths that really prioritize the spirit over the body we see both. Our God is incarnate in the flesh.

But even in Genesis one, in the first line, the scripture, God created heaven and the earth. Like it’s holy, it’s holy ground. And we tilled the ground. So. So you think then the earth is holy? It’s you know, it’s going to be redeemed, it’s fallen, but it’s beautiful. You have our Savior who comes in the flesh. He is he dies in the flesh. He’s buried in the flesh. He’s risen in the flesh. He’s coming again in the flesh.

<p>We have the millennial kingdom on earth, in the flesh.And so this is a core value to the early church. And so they’re saying, “We know that God can collect the body parts. If you die at sea, it doesn’t mean you won’t be resurrected. But also we promise to honor you. If you give your life to Jesus and are killed for it, we’ll sacrifice or risk our lives to go in and give you a decent burial.”

So you have one. I can think of two sisters Praxedes and Prudentiana, their names, churches named for them in Rome. They’re still operating today. And we see the beautiful mosaics in the ninth century of their work, in the second or third century. And they’re bone collectors. So they’re risking their lives whenever there are Christians are tortured and killed to go collect them.

And these sisters were not martyred. But when somebody is not martyred but punished or tortured, we call them a confessor. So they’re confessors in that they risk their lives for their brothers and sisters.

I had one little old lady who was like in her eighties and super little tiny woman bony hands come up to me after a talk on this issue. She said, “I would have been a bone collector.”

Sharifa >> We love her.

Dr. Glahn >> We do. We absolutely love her. And but this is the kind of thing I’m talking about where wifehood and motherhood is included and it’s a high and holy calling. But there are also bone collectors and benefactors. And, you know, you see a hint of that in Phoebe. In Romans 16:1, Paul is thanking her she’s carried the book, what we now know as the book of Romans to the church in Rome, and he calls her a benefactor.

You look at the women in Luke 8:1-2 who are bankrolling Jesus and the guys. So we trace some of that. You have Empress Theodora who is married to Emperor Justinian in the sixth century. We see them in ninth century mosaics in Ravenna. And she is low-born. And she gets to know a young man who’s not yet emperor, and they have no clue he’s going to be an emperor.

She’s probably a woman of the night because she’s in poverty. But he discovers this woman talks turkey to me like she’ll tell it to me straight. She has nothing to lose. So then when he raises in power and she is raised in respectability, shall we say, he really loves her because he’s surrounded by yes men and people who tell him whatever he wants to hear.

But she tells him the truth. And so he has the laws changed so he can marry her. They profess Christianity, and she is the first person in history to fight human trafficking from a government perspective.

I know we have wonderful stories, wonderful stories of what women have done beyond motherhood. Or after motherhood or when they could with a mother, with motherhood. Or many of them chose to remain virgins and this was not a purity culture decision. This was an empire decision where they’re like, since the emperor is requiring a certain number of babies because he has to staff his army and the number one cause of death for men is the army. These women are saying, my Savior’s kingdom is not of this world. I’m not giving you a son to go kill people.

I’m going to remain celibate. So if you go to Ravenna again, this is Ravenna probably has the best mosaics in the world for early Christianity. You walk into one church, Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, which is the New Sant’Apollinare, which is I find funny because you name something new in the sixth century. All these years later, we’re still calling it new. Maybe we shouldn’t do that. But anyway, I digress.

You walk in and you look up and flanking you on the walls are life size 22 women. 20 of them are virgins. Two of them are married, proceeding to the throne of Christ. Mary is holding baby Jesus on the throne, but he’s got a cross in his halo, which tells us he’s God. On the left. On the right, you see 27 male martyrs proceeding to the throne of Christ, holding the seven seals.

So imagine you walk into a worship space and you are flanked by this huge cloud of witnesses, men matching women in the lineup. The only difference is in front of the three women is the three wise men, because all the women are from the East and all the men are from the West.

So you have male/female, east/west represented in these beautiful mosaics. And one of the things that we see in the early mosaics is this parity of men and women. You don’t see this predominant male everything. So imagine this. You’re at the altar you look up and you see a mosaic of Melchizedek and Abel. And the reason they’re chosen is because they’re the two that have received or given perfect offerings of the earliest reference like so far.

So there’s a biblical literary literacy in some of these choices that just stories we would not necessarily put together and then you look up on the right and here’s Empress Theodora, who I mention, this woman who’s fighting for justice for very poor people. And she’s holding the cup in her hand. She is flanked by her spiritual advisors. And we know this because as we’re learning visual literacy, we’re learning that if a woman or man, if someone is holding what’s called a maniple, which we would probably look at as a long sash or a handkerchief over your hand, then that’s what you can handle holy objects with.

So Mary is sometimes has a maniple as she’s holding baby Jesus. And again, because we didn’t grow up with this tradition. We don’t know what we’re looking at. We just think she’s got a cloth in her hand.

But for the Princess Empress, Theodora, to be flanked by these women that have maniples, that means they’re her spiritual advisors, not just her quote, ladies in waiting.

And so she’s on one side.

Over on the other side is Justinian. He’s carrying the basket with bread in it. And this is really interesting because, you know, then later in the church, you hear that women cannot serve communion, that this is something that people who are ordained do and in many traditions women don’t even touch the cup or the plate, that the bread and wine are carried in.

Even if you think about Virgin Mary has the body and blood of our Lord and her womb for nine months, like, if anything, dignifies humanity, uh, human womanhood, if it’s not being created in the womb, the image of God, it’s that the baby Jesus, God, is being carried in his mother’s womb.

So that’s the sort of thing we’re seeing in the visual record. It’s male and female rather than predominantly male, which is very interesting when you consider the creation record that it’s not good for a man to be alone. And it’s not just in marriage.

And so these early church images where you see brothers and sisters, you see male and female saints, it’s really encouraging.

There’s one church, the church of Praxede in Rome. You walk in and you see this arch that has the 12 apostles and then Jesus, these are in mosaics, and then the inner arch inside that has eight women. And then Peter and Paul— Peter, Paul and Mary in the middle. And for the longest time, we’re like, Who could these women be? Because of course, you know, the 12 guys are going to be?

And an archeologist recently Carina Prestes, who’s a Brazilian archeologist, today released a book called Excavating Women. And she identified them as the eight named women in the Gospels, which makes perfect sense that the earlier church would have known them as much as they knew the 12 apostles. But again, because we’ve sort of lost the women, particularly in the record of saints, we can’t name Joanna and you know, we can’t we can’t just rattle off who those were.

You know, we know Mary Magdalene. We can maybe slowly put it together, but we know wife of Chuza but the earlier church that maybe couldn’t read, they also had a lot of this memorized.

Sharifa >> Yeah, it does strike me how literacy has changed what we remember and how we remember it, which is so fascinating. But what we have in the visual record is another form of a cloud of witnesses to tell the story of what we’ve been missing. Also to inform us of what their theopraxis was, what they valued.

Dr. Glahn >> Yes.

Sharifa >> And how they valued it. And it bears a striking contrast sometimes. That’s what you are outlining.

Dr. Glahn >> That’s the goal. Yeah.

What have we lost and what can we recover?

Sharifa >> What can we recover?

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah.

Sharifa >> And what is worth recovering? And there’s so much that’s so much worth recovering, even in the Protestant tradition.

Dr. Glahn >> Absolutely.

Sharifa >> Okay, I’m gonna ask you a, I guess behind the scenes question, which is what kinds of sources and you’ve mentioned some of them, but what kind of sources do you draw from when creating or curating visual representation of historical art.

Dr. Glahn >> So the best, in my opinion, is the mosaics because they’re made of stone and glass that don’t fade. And so these mosaics that were put up in the eighth, ninth century, they could have been installed last week. The other thing that’s really funny about mosaics is there has been some effort to erase some of the really overt women in leadership.

For example, in the Church of Praxedes that I mentioned there is an inscription over a woman that calls her and labels her as Theodora Episcopa, and episcopa is the Greek word for bishop. So you can see that Theodora has been they’ve taken the little tesserae or the little squares, and they’ve replaced them with just plain ones so that it is Theodo. Theodo. But they did it A) they did a really sloppy job. But the other thing is in the same church, there’s that full inscription with Theodora from the same era. So we know they missed that one. So sometimes.

Sharifa >> So they were sloppy!

Dr. Glahn >> They were sloppy. But like the, you know, the cover up is

Sharifa >> Revisionist.

Dr. Glahn >> Revisionist is more interesting than the original.

So anyway, mosaics are really fun in the visual record. There’s another place where Mary, Jesus’s mother, is dressed as a deacon or a bishop, depending on the era. And she had a cross on her stall and it was turned into an “L”.

<p>And again, that little tesserae on either side of the cross bars were just removed sloppily again. And so we have some close ups of that work.<p>So you have the visual record, the you have the attempt to alter the mosaics. You have frescoes. Again, I mentioned some of the architecture. You have early statues there.One of the pieces of the visual record that I talked about in an earlier BOW podcast was the Megiddo Mosaic and you have a woman there who is dedicating an altar. It’s written out in it’s a mosaic, but it’s spelled out in the mosaic. And her name is, well, doesn’t matter.

And what matters is she dedicates an altar to Jesus, God, and this is in the year 230, and that is now the earliest visual record we have of the church calling Jesus God. We knew a lot from the written record.

Sharifa >> Wow!

Dr. Glahn >> I know.

And particularly fun on the anniversary of Nicaea, to see that Constantine might have had influence 100, 80, 90, years later. But the church didn’t start calling Jesus God with Constantine. The visual record is there for us. So the mosaics are my favorite. But again, some the mosaics are in combination with the architecture, as in the case of the Megiddo or Megiddo Mosaic. Akeptous is her name. And her name does matter. But my point is it’s not the most important point I’m trying to make.

The other thing that is included in the visual record sometimes is coins. We haven’t really explored a lot of that yet. But again, in 4.0, we have lots of plans for expanding because that helps us with dating. But even in the Megiddo mosaic that I mentioned, we can date some of the issues because of the way things are. It would be like using a Courier font versus a Times Roman. Like we can approximately date when that started.

Sharifa >> Yeah.

Dr. Glahn >> And so anyway, it helps us with dating, but of course for me it’s much more interesting when it’s helping us to see that men and women are partnering together in the early church.

The other thing that’s on the site is that Dr. Lynn Cohick, who is one of the co-founders with me of the Visual Museum, for a while, she had her masters and doctoral students doing research on each of the people featured. So that when you click on Theodora, you get her story and then you get what we think might have been embellished. But you know, that’s not really the main point. Yes, some of these stories got embellished, but that doesn’t mean we throw them out.

I think the embellishment is a little bit like what today we would call fan fiction.

Sharifa >> Yes.

Dr. Glahn >> And just because there’s fan fiction doesn’t mean the original wasn’t legit or like we have to just throw out the whole thing.

Sharifa >> What geographical regions are you looking at?

Dr. Glahn >> So good question. Since you have so much of the early church in Rome and the letter to the Romans, we have started in Italy, but we have now expanded to Spain. And I just applied for $14,000 grant to go to Ethiopia. So I mean, some of it depends on funding, but we want to go to India.

Sharifa >> Yes.

Dr. Glahn >> We want to go, you know, to the ends of the earth.

Sharifa >> Yes.

Dr. Glahn >> So yeah.

Sharifa >> I mean that’s what the early church did.

Dr. Glahn >> It is. Yeah.

Sharifa >> It’s like walking in the same.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah.

I just had a zoom with my Ethiopia scout last week and she’s got the places plotted for us to go photograph as soon as we can raise up the money.

Sharifa >> Well, okay, audience. Some of you might be looking for charitable donation possibilities. And so I’ll just put that right there.

Okay, how does visual storytelling change the way people understand theology, Scripture and churches?

Dr. Glahn >> Hoo-woo. I think the first thing that I love about my job is when I get to take students to Italy to some of these places. There’s a lot of weeping. And this is the line I hear, “I can’t unsee this. Like there is no amount of book reading or preaching or, you know, hearing that I can be told that this wasn’t happening. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And I can’t unsee it.”

I think another thing that’s been really important is that it emphasizes representation. And that has been meaningful for men and women alike. The other thing that we’ll see, like one of my favorite stories that’s represented in two different places in Ravenna is a story of two women who were imprisoned for their faith and martyred as a result.

And Felicitas and Perpetua are thrown in prison together. One is lower class. She’s in the slave class and one is in the noble class. They love each other as sisters. And the woman who is literate writes down her story. We still have it today. You can read the story of being thrown in the prison for your faith and the decisions they had to make about—I think it was Felicitas who was pregnant and Rome had a rule that they would not kill someone imprisoned until the baby was born.

And so she was praying that her child would come early. So that she would not be left alone and then martyred alone. And the child did come early and they were rejoicing that she then got to be martyred with her Christian siblings.

Sharifa >> Oh.

Dr. Glahn >> I know. And then in, you know, a Christian woman offered to raise the child for her.

But what these people are giving up, and we have first person accounts. And there’s another quote, role of women that we don’t hear much, and that is Junia who’s mentioned in Romans 16. We’re so busy fighting over whether she was an apostle, we miss that she was in prison. Paul mentioned she’s in prison. And then you have this account of these two women that are imprisoned and you have in the literary record reference to Christian women who are thrown in prison and the conditions that they endured and the risk. I know.

And so there’s a hush—that you say, okay, this puts my life in perspective. It doesn’t mean my suffering is invalid, but it also it brings reverence and respect. I stand on the shoulders of a great cloud of witnesses. I’m not inventing anything new.

Another thing that we see is women in translation. When you get a little later in the fourth century, Paula, and her daughter, who’s very long name, starts with an E, I still have to learn all these names. She’s helping Jerome with his translation work. And Jerome says of her, you know, she could she was so good at Hebrew that people living in Palestine couldn’t tell that she wasn’t born there. And we do not often hear about women in the great translation tradition.

The other thing that we start seeing is now we know who some of these women are. Then who some of the men like Ambrose, who is the bishop of Milan in the early church, they are taking these women saints days and spending their Sunday sermon telling these women’s stories. So the thing that’s encouraging about that is these stories are not just for women. The stories of the men and women are for men and women.

And so that’s the other thing is to see how meaningful that has been for men and women.

Sharifa >> Yes.

Selah.

How do you select which women to feature next, given the vast. Yeah.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So one thing people will say to us is I’m traveling to Croatia. What can I photograph for you? And we’ll say, well, that’s just it there’s not a catalog anywhere of what’s anywhere. And often the things that you find are in the little tiny chapels nobody’s ever heard of.

Or if there’s been a book done on, let’s say, the art of Praxedes or the art of the Church of Pudenziana, there’s not a book that says, Okay, all the women in the Roman churches. Right?

And we’re at the embryo stage of starting to use reverse imaging on AI to even identify some of these people we’re looking at. And so this very serendipitous in terms of grants we asked for Spain, we got Spain, and now we’re asking for Ethiopia, hoping to get it.

So we want to think globally, but also we’re hoping that a time will come when people who’ve traveled can upload their photos on a place like they do on Unsplash so that we are not just having to raise funds to send a photographer somewhere, but that as people go and they stumble on a teeny tiny church of Thekla at the top of a mountain, which has happened, then we add it.

So to answer your question, how do we select? Well, we select from what we end up with, what we have the researchers to verify. It’s a little bit serendipitous right now, and also it’s largely volunteer driven. So it’s, you know, what we have the power to want to say manpower, but, you know, it’s the power, the people power.

Sharifa >> Yeah. The people power.

So people who are listening or watching this who are going on their vacations to Italy or France or India or Ethiopia.

Yeah, they can if they wanted to submit photos. But what is the website?

Dr. Glahn >> We’re not ready for them to submit photos. What we could use is a list of what you saw and where you saw it.

Sharifa >> Okay.

Dr. Glahn >> So that when when we send— when we get a team to go, we know that it’s there and that eliminates a whole level of having to do scouting.

Sharifa >> Right. Okay, so send them to you.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah, send them through, there’s a contact sheet on or contact form on the VisualMuseum.Gallery site and let us know what you found where you found it.

Sharifa >> Oh, can you say that again? The URL again, please.

Dr. Glahn >> So www.VisualMuseum.gallery and that’s what confuses like people will do .com but it’s a lot of art spaces are on .gallery if you can remember that that will help.

Sharifa >> Okay, VisualMuseum.gallery. Okay, final question, what upcoming exhibits partnerships or expansions are you most excited about?

Dr. Glahn >> Well, we are getting ready to work with the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. And there they have an icon exhibit coming up. And so we’re working in partnership with them to talk about the Visual Museum and how to read an icon and you know, some of those women and iconography.

For example, you have Saint Apollonia who is martyred by having her teeth pulled out.

Sharifa >> Oh my goodness!

Dr. Glahn >> If you Google her name, you will find some dental practices named after her. And also I’ve started noticing women, a woman holding a huge pair of pinchers in the visual record is Apollonia. So we’re just even

Sharifa >> Are you serious?

Dr. Glahn >> I know. So we’re just starting to even recognize what’s there, what we have.

So each time I go back to spaces where I’ve already been, I’m seeing women that I didn’t see before or I couldn’t identify before. I didn’t even know I’d looked at them until I see that, oh, there’s a woman with a little lamb. That’s Agnes, you know, Agnes is Latin for lamb. And just as we start figuring out what they’re holding or how they’re represented, we’re finding more and more women were there all the time.

We just didn’t know who they were.

Sharifa >> Wow. Okay.

Well, my mind is blown and my curiosity is piqued and I hope that you get all the funding you need.

Dr. Glahn >> Thank you.

Sharifa >> We need this visual record. We need to go back and reclaim. There’s a Ghanaian concept of Sankofa. It’s like going back and getting what was lost.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah.

Sharifa>> And this project is so much about going back and reclaiming part of our inheritance

Dr. Glahn >> Exactly.

Sharifa >> as Christians. Not as Christian women,

Dr. Glahn >> Right. Yeah. Just as Christians, right.

Sharifa >> Yes. Because both men and women can be inspired by the knowledge of these women’s histories and what they endured and the shoulders that we indeed do stand on. So thank you for your work.

Dr. Glahn >> You’re welcome. We would just love listeners to use the site. The downloads are free. You just click on the free download and start including them in your handouts and your homeschools and your presentations. That would thrill us to just seeing people use them.

Sharifa >> And your sermons.

Dr. Glahn >> Yeah.

Sharifa >> All of it. Just all of it. Yes.

So that’s our talk for today. And you can find many other podcasts and videos pertaining to the role of women in the church by logging on to our website at BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org, clicking Resources and then scrolling to Church Issues.

Again, Dr. Glahn, it’s always, always a pleasure and a revelation to talk to you.

Thank you for sharing with us about the Visual Museum of Women in Christianity.

Dr. Glahn >> Thank you, Sharifa. Always good to talk to you.