"The International Catacomb Society is extremely pleased, today, to have, as the Estelle Shohet Brettman Lecturer for 1997, Prof. Bernadette Brooten of Brandeis University. Her studies in the New Testament, Post-Biblical Judaism, Early Christian Literature and History, and her contributions to the body of scholarship about women and religion have assured her position as an eminent and accomplished religious historian.

Prof. Brooten earned a Bachelor of Arts in German, which was awarded Maxima Cum Laude by the University of Portland. It was followed by post-graduate work at the University of Tubingen in Germany, at Harvard, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her Ph.D. degree from Harvard, where her thesis topic was Women as Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue.

Prof. Brooten has been the recipient of countless honors and grants for her teaching accomplishments and her publications. Her 1996 book, Love Between Women, for which she has received a Lambda Literary Award and a nomination for a National Book Award, has most recently won her the 1997 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies Category.

She has taught at the University of Tubingen, Claremont College and Graduate School, the Hawaii Consortium for Theological Education, and at Harvard Divinity School. where she served as Assistant and then Associate Professor of Scripture and Interpretation between 1985 and 1993. In 1993, she was named the Robert and Myra Kraft and Jacob Hiatt Associate Professor of Christian Studies at Brandeis University, holding this chair since 1996 as a full professor. With several significant books to her credit, a formidable list of articles published, as well as many more in the press or in progress, and the many other professional activities she carries on in addition to her teaching, Prof. Brooten is surely. as the Good Book says, a "Woman of Valor"!

I am honored to present to you, Prof. Bernadette Brooten                 - Florence Z. Wolsky, ICS