Celebrating a Contemporary Scholar!

By Dr. Grace May, Director of The Women’s Institute

Dr. Gina Zurlo, Ph.D in History and Hermeneutics, Boston University, 2007

In honor of Women’s History Month, we would like to celebrate a contemporary scholar and my colleague, Dr. Gina Zurlo.

After years of research, Dr. Zurlo made the startling finding that “There is a chronic lack of data on gender in World Christianity.”  Women are the pillars of churches worldwide, yet the statistics don’t support it or the numbers are not reported. The video linked below is a seminar discussing Dr. Zurlo's recent research from her Women in World Christianity Project, which was the first demographic assessment of Christianity down to the denominational level in every country of the world.  Start the video at 15:15 minutes.

Beginning in August 2023, she will be a Yang Visiting Scholar in World Christianity at Harvard Divinity School.

 Dr. Zurlo is the author of Global Christianity: A Guide to the World’s Largest Religion from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe (Zondervan 2022), the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and an interdisciplinary scholar in history, sociology, and global Christianity. Her upcoming book Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement is based on the project “Women in World Christianity: A Mixed-Methods Study of Gender in the World’s Largest Religion,” funded by the Louisville Institute. The project includes percentages of Christian women of every denomination in every country of the world and explores their contributions from pastoring to peacebuilding.