Synchroblog for International Women's Day

Today, 8 March, is International Women's Day, and it has captured the imagination of a group of Christians, many of them in the USA, enough to inspire them to have a synchroblog to mark the occasion. So people who participated have blogged on women of the Bible, or Christian women in history.

Here are links to some of the blog posts that are already up, and you should find more links at the end of each post to follow them.

• Julie Clawson on The God Who Sees
• Steve Hayes on St. Theodora the Iconodule
• Sonja Andrews on Aunt Jemima
• Sensuous Wife on A Single Mom in the Bible
• Minnowspeaks on Celebrating Women
• Michelle Van Loon on The Persistent Widow
• Lyn Hallawell on International Women’s Day
  
• Heather on The Strength of Biblical Women
• Shawna Atteberry on The Daughter of Mary Magdalene
• Christine Sine on women who impacted her life
• Susan Barnes on International Women’s Day
• Ellen Haroutunian on Out from Under the Veil
• Liz Dyer on Mary and Martha: A Story about God’s Radical Hospitality
• Bethany Stedman on Shiprah and Puah
  
• Dan Brennan on Mary Magdalene

I had never paid much attention to International Women's Day before, partly because we have a national Women's Day on 9th August, which is a public holiday. So I looked up Internatonal Women's Day, and discovered a little about its history. It seems that is very much a socialist festival, and I found it quite interesting that many of the women who are participating in this synchroblog are Americans of evangelical Christian background. According to the news media, American evangelicals are almost synonymous with the "religious right", and so the very fact of this synchroblog breaks stereotypes, not only about women, but also about the "religious right" and the American aversion to "socialism".

I thought the easiest way to write it was to look up saints commemorated on 8 March, and to blog about any women saints commemorated on that day. It turned out that it was the first Sunday in Lent, the Sunday of Orthodoxy, and so it seemed logical to write about St Theodora the Iconodule, who established the practice of observing the First Sunday of Lent in this way -- a shrewd move, because it has probably protected the Orthodox Church from iconoclasm to this day.