Joseph Phillip Amar is professor emeritus of semitic languages and early Christian studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is a priest in the Syriac Maronite Church and author of a forthcoming biography of St. 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.
