In the sea of long black robes and white beards at the recent Orthodox Council in Crete, there was “a thimbleful of women” present to remind the male delegates there of the real world outside their closed-door conference. There were only three of them among the 290 participants and two were nuns (from Greece and Albania).

And then there was probably the most unlikely participant of them all.  Elizabeth Prodromou, an American of Greek and Greek Cypriot heritage, is a university professor, former diplomat, wife, mother and former member of the parish council at her church outside Boston. She has a Ph.D in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and teaches and writes on religion and international relations.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who championed Orthodoxy’s first such council in 1,200 as a way to respond to the challenges of the modern world, included her in his delegation. “I would wish I were not part of a thimbleful, but instead there were an ocean of us,” Prodromou told The Tablet between sessions of the Council in Kolymbari in western Crete.