How can we enter more deeply into an appreciation of the women of the New Testament as apostles of Jesus? For centuries, we have told their stories by casting them into roles defined by their social condition, their body status, or their provision of service.

Reaching back into Celtic expressions of the sacred feminine, including how the Celtic and the Christian communities first wove traditions together, we will seek to  liberate the women of the gospels and the stories of the early church to hear and see women as the apostles they truly were, embodying aspects of the sacred feminine that existed long before Jesus came. While familiar figures will be considered, we will also explore the less familiar figures of the New Testament, seeing their prototypes in other pre-Christian cultural contexts.

Ultimately, we will engage in an Ignatian-style imaginary prayer exercise in which we bring some of the women together at Jacob's well, where Jesus met the Samaritan woman. What would an imagined symposium of such figures bring forward? How might it offer us food for our journeys of faith in our own time?