Dr. Constance Tarasar

When Tarasar enrolled at St Vladimir's she was the first woman to be admitted to one of its degree programmes — not to a certificate or an auditor's place, but to the degree itself. She graduated in 1965, and the thesis she chose to write was on the role of women in the Orthodox Church, examined through its history and its theology.

That was not a safe subject in 1965 and it was not assigned to her. It is worth noticing what she did with the position afterwards: she did not leave and she did not campaign. She came back in 1970 as a lecturer and spent thirty-three years teaching, which meant that for most of a generation every student who passed through that seminary was taught by a woman. A later dean said simply that she had served as a real leader and model for the women students.

Tarasar's largest body of work is also the least visible: the church-school curriculum used across North American parishes for decades. As executive secretary of the Orthodox Christian Education Commission — a body endorsed across jurisdictions — and as head of religious education for the Orthodox Church in America and, for a period, for the Antiochian Archdiocese, she wrote, commissioned and edited an enormous quantity of teaching material.

It is the kind of labour that leaves no monument. A parish that has good church-school books does not know whose they are. Late in her career she helped adapt Orthodox curricula for use in Eastern Europe after the fall of the communist regimes, and worked on bringing Orthodox education online. In 1989 she completed an Ed.D. and was, by her seminary's account, the first Orthodox Christian educator in the United States to hold a doctorate in the field.

For the bicentennial of the United States and the two-hundredth anniversary approaching of the Alaskan mission, the Orthodox Church in America commissioned a history of itself. Tarasar was its general editor, with John H. Erickson as associate editor and contributions from Alexander Schmemann, Leonid Kishkovsky and others; it appeared in 1975.

Orthodox America 1794–1976 was the first serious attempt to tell the whole story of the Orthodox Church on this continent in one volume, and it remains a standard reference for the period it covers. Much of what a page like this one can say about the American Church rests, at some remove, on the work she organized.

In September 1976 the World Council of Churches convened the first international consultation of Orthodox women, at the monastery of Agapia in Romania. Tarasar represented the United States and edited the resulting report, Orthodox Women: Their Role and Participation in the Orthodox Church, published at Geneva.

Agapia is remembered as the point at which Orthodox women from across the traditional Orthodox countries and the diaspora addressed the question together for the first time. That the American delegate and the editor of its record was the same woman who had written a seminary thesis on the subject eleven years earlier is not a coincidence; it is a career.

Constance Tarasar's significance is easy to state and easy to underrate. She was the first woman to take a degree at an American Orthodox seminary, and then she stayed for thirty-three years, so that a whole generation of clergy and teachers were formed by a woman scholar without that being remarkable. She wrote the church-school books, and she edited the first real history of the Church on this continent — two kinds of work that shape what people know while leaving the author invisible.

She has not been glorified and nothing here suggests otherwise; this is a record, not a veneration. But a database of the Orthodox Church in America that names its bishops and theologians and omits the woman who wrote its history and taught its children would be telling the story wrong.