Joseph Phillip Amaris professor emeritus of Middle East languages, history, and cultures at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of the forthcoming biography of Ephrem the Syrian, Dangerous Poet.
While St. Ephrem of Syria did not explicitly call for ordination of women to the diaconate, he envisioned radical equality between the sexes in ministry.
The territory along the Syrian-Turkish border is the ancestral homeland of an ancient tradition of Aramaic-speaking Christianity. They’ve been betrayed before.
