The path that leads to the new book, "Lady Church in the Christian Imagination," is a long and winding path. The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh, an associate professor of English at the University of Arkansas, will deliver a pair of talks inspired by her book later this month as part of the Tippy McMichael Speaker Series at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Fayetteville. Her book explores Lady Church, a feminine figure whose historical prominence has been overlooked.
Lora Walsh came to our studio to talk about the book, but first more about the route she took to get to the book. She grew up Episcopalian and remembers when she was in elementary school, when her church welcomed its first female clergy person.
"So we had three men who were all priests, and then we had this new young woman. I don't remember many details, but I remember just the adult buzz that it was kind of a big deal. I don't remember hostility or resistance or anything like that. I just knew it was new."
Years later, attending a more conservatively related university, she heard fellow students discuss what role women should have in a church.
“It was a big, big deal.”
She says that was her first experience with there being passionate debate about gender roles in the church, and the differing opinions intrigued her, and she continued to consider those discrepancies across denominations.
"Some allow women to have access to all leadership roles and educational opportunities, and others don't."
And then from 2002 to 2004, Lora Walsh taught at an all-boys high school in Kathmandu.
"The boys in my class often had notebooks with a Hindu goddess, Saraswati, on the notebooks that they took their notes in and took exams in, studied from. And Saraswati is a goddess of wisdom or education, and when they had an exam, many of them would stop by Saraswati's temple and give offerings or just offer a prayer to help them with their studies. This was completely new to me, the idea of devotion to a goddess. And it was especially striking, I think, because it was teenage boys. And this is part of their religiosity.
"I also, when I lived there, many people were very hospitable to me. I got invited to a family's home for Lakshmi Puja. So this is an observance of devotion to Lakshmi, who's the goddess of wealth. And so that too was really striking to me. We have a devotion to a goddess, and she's connected with abundance and prosperity. And the last thing is I got to visit a Kali temple. So Kali is a kind of fierce goddess. Some goddesses often have consorts, that is, male partners, and other goddesses are more independent."
Then returned to the United States to begin a PhD program in medieval Christianity at Northwestern.
"I also was a teaching assistant for a class called 'Goddesses East and West,' and we read about lots of different goddesses in Hinduism, Buddhism, and then feminine representations of the divine within Christianity and Judaism as well. So that kind of set me up for paying attention to Lady Church. And some people are familiar with the phrase mother church. So I had been aware of that, but Lady Church, actually the reason I chose it is there's a second-century Greek text. Some people might know that Christ is often addressed as kyrios, which is Greek for Lord. And in this text, the church, Ecclesia, is addressed as kyria. So it's the feminine form. So here in that text, there was a lord and a lady. So I chose that title for my book, 'Lady Church.'"
Kellams: So this idea that the church is feminine from a, if I pull back sort of a secular view, I don't know if it's done so much anymore, but it used to be that cities would be referred to as a feminine or maybe even a building, the Christ, she's weathered the storm. Is it like that or is it a deeper, more literal thought?
Walsh: Yeah. So I think it's deeper. Especially, I think the idea that, I guess it's more ambitious theologically, that the church kind of exists apart from or in addition to the buildings, the people, the institutional history, all of that, that she's a being. And I don't know that there's this quite the same with cities. Usually cities, even if they're talked about in feminized language, or boats, there's usually this idea like they were founded at a certain time by a certain leader, their infrastructure was built or fell apart and was rebuilt. It's a little more material historical. And the church, it seems to be bigger than that.
Kellams: Yeah. You found this when this was introduced to you as you're studying medieval Christianity.
Walsh: Yes.
Kellams: Was it more likely that Lady Church would be referred to or understood centuries ago than now?
Walsh: Yes, absolutely. So there was a big change in the Roman Catholic Church after Vatican II, the sort of famous church council in the 1960s. There was an intentional shift to using the people of God as the terminology for the church. Instead of that, you still see mother church and that kind of thing. But that was a very intentional break from conscious, consistent, feminine language for the church.
"I honestly don't know when exactly it drops off, but other than to say, because I haven't gone through all the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, all the why, but I can say broadly it was just everywhere. And I thought maybe after the Reformation it would drop off. But as I started looking into that, I thought, this is everywhere. The Catholics, the Protestants, the mainstream Protestants, or the kind of establishment Protestants, the Puritans, the Puritan separatists. They all feminize the church. So that's kind of where I ended the book, but it's everywhere back then and very rare now.
Kellams: Feminizing the church as mother, as wife, as what?
Walsh: Yeah. So there's a virgin is very common. And oftentimes people will spell out the significance. So the church is virginal, a virgin in the sense that she preserves doctrine, pure in its integrity and wholeness for all time. You can trust her. So that's what the virginity of the church signifies.
"Mother church, the maternal imagery for the church can, depending on the author, signifies, the church is trustworthy. She can give birth to souls, to new Christians. She can nourish the way that a mother does. For some that involves interpreting and processing scripture and transmitting it to people through sermons or more accessible forms than just reading biblical texts directly. She can also provide resources. So the church gives to the poor, the way that a mother would care for those in need. And so that imagery has a lot to do with caregiving, birth giving, educating, maternal imagery.
"Some describe the church as a widow, waiting for Christ's return. So there's a degree to which the church is in mourning. She is a fiancee, so like an engaged woman waiting for her spouse to come home and marry her, for Christ to return to earth, that can be part of the narrative. But I'm especially interested, I'm sorry to use this word, but it gets used, the church as a whore. Sometimes a whore. Yes. A prostitute or a sex worker.
Kellams: he last chapter, yes, delves into this poem.
Walsh: Yeah. So actually, my Sunday morning talk at St. Paul's later this month will be on the church as promiscuous. So sometimes there's a particular woman in the book of Genesis named Tamar who disguises herself as a sex worker. And so there are folks who in the past kind of read her as like a figure of the church, who entices Christ to be incarnate or born on earth. And they analogize that process to a man hiring a sex worker. So the church is kind of disguised on earth, for Christ is born and entices Christ to come and sort of save her or marry her.
So also, other examples of this are the church as kind of having, there's a medieval vision of the church in a poem called Piers Plowman, where she says, any man who is loyal to me and loves me will be my Lord in heaven, meaning like my husband. But my, like, landed gentry, her spouse in heaven. And so she presents herself as willing to take many different lovers. And that becomes the metaphor for salvation. And then there's a famous poem by John Donne that analogizes the church to sort of like an unfaithful or nonexclusive spouse. So that's some of the more unexpected imagery.
Kellams: What I, well, what I think I know about medieval Christianity is that there was a pretty strong patriarchy, right? Okay. So these images of the feminine church, mother, fiancee, widow are still, I'm guessing, feminine images projected by men.
Walsh: Yes, yes.
Kellams: Centuries of men.
Walsh: Right, right. Yes.
Kellams: So that's interesting.
Walsh: I know it is. And this is a big question in religious studies more broadly is what is the relationship between having prominent feminine divine figures, prominent goddesses or saints who are women, and the actual opportunities for leadership, life determination, role selection, education for actual women. And broadly speaking, there's not a relationship. You can have a very somewhat masculine imagery of the divine and yet also have women with opportunities. You can have gorgeous feminine imagery for the divine and have really limited roles and opportunity for women. So there's not a strong correlation. I think for a long time people assumed, and there is a tradition of neopaganism and goddess feminism, where you say if we promote stronger feminine imagery, that there will be greater sense of self-worth and empowerment for women. I think that that can happen. But broadly speaking, there's not a direct correlation between having feminine imagery of the divine and male or female role or greater female opportunities.
But in this particular case, what I found most interesting is that men were willing to imagine themselves as the embodiment of the feminine church. So they describe their roles as preachers and biblical interpreters as maternal, like we are, as I mentioned earlier, we are digesting scripture and feeding our congregations with it. When we baptize, it's like we're giving birth to, as the mother church. So for me, seeing that willingness to embody the feminine church was really interesting to me.
And even Peter, who traditionally is regarded as the first pope. One biblical commentary I read on the Gospel of Matthew says that when Jesus says to Peter, on this rock I will build my church, you will have the keys, the stuff that is taken to authorize him as the first pope. This commentary said, it's as if Christ said, you are my body and my spouse on earth, and I am your spouse, your husband in heaven. And so Peter himself is the bride. Christ's bride embodies the bride. So for me, it was just this willingness to imagine yourself in these different roles, sometimes masculine, sometimes feminine, even maternal. That was most interesting.
Kellams: Oh, that's fascinating.
Walsh: Yeah.
Kellams: Yeah. If you want to research 19th century Christianity, you can find a lot in English. If you want to research medieval Christianity, there ain't much in English. So what did you have to do to do this research?
Walsh: That's a great question. So it's English, but it's Middle English. So if you're familiar with Shakespeare at all, it's harder than that. So F's and S's are all mixed up.
Kellams: Yes, they are.
Walsh: So I had to learn Greek, Latin and Middle English. And Middle English you could kind of learn by assimilation, just reading a lot. I took classes in the Canterbury Tales and other Middle English works, Piers Plowman. So those are kind of the big three that you need to learn.
But the other thing that's also kind of the extra skills you need is you can't just go to the library and find these books. So lots of the work that I did was with manuscripts and with early print sources. So fortunately, the University of Arkansas gave me a grant to digitize some of the manuscripts I had used there in England. I'd used them for my dissertation, but I can't fly back and forth to England. And so I got a grant to pay the British Library and Cambridge University Library to digitize some things for me. And then in the meantime, Durham Cathedral Library had a Latin manuscript that I used a lot, and they just digitized it on their own. And it's freely available. So those manuscript skills, and that requires being able to read medieval handwriting, which is a totally separate skill from the language learning. There's complicated systems of abbreviation that they use.
Kellams: I imagine it's like being a court stenographer, right? You have to learn how to read those things.
Walsh: So that is an additional layer. That's tricky.
Kellams: Can researching this help inform you and others in 2026? I mean, about where we've been, why we're where we are now?
Walsh: Yes. I didn't, I thought about writing an epilogue, conclusion or something about this, but to me, what really, I think what can be brought, especially into the world where religious affiliation is a choice. And we have a whole range of institutions, including secular institutions that even religiously affiliated people are part of. To me, this book was about the spirituality of falling in love with an institution, even when you critique it, and that is I would really love to see that carried away. Like, how do you serve and be inspired by and build institutions, be completely open to their, to critiques of them and to give those critiques in order to make them better.
So for them, they imagined their churches, institutions, national churches and stuff as ladies, as romance heroines. For us, we might not want to do that. But I actually am really drawn to the maternal imagery. I think some of it's like played in Mother Earth stuff, this comet concept. But I have had so many institutions that have nourished me, nurtured me, and just experiencing gratitude. And that includes churches, universities. Even the university, it kind of gave a hard time at the beginning of the talk where I went to college. It gave me opportunities to travel. It gave me faculty who invested in me. And so being critical but loving toward these institutions that have cared for us.
The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh is the author of "Lady Church in the Christian Imagination" and is an associate professor of English at the University of Arkansas. She's the next guest in the Tippy McMichael Speaker Series at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Fayetteville, Saturday, Aug. 22. She'll deliver the talk "The Leading Lady of Salvation." That's 7 p.m. that night on the 22nd. Then Sunday morning, Aug. 23, she'll present "The Promiscuous Church," beginning at 10 a.m. Our conversation took place at the Carver Center for Public Radio last week.
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