The 2022 Awardees of the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship
The Women’s Ordination Conference and the Durkin-Dierks Family are happy to announce the awardees of the 2022 Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship:
Adina Meyer
Corinna Robinson
Please join us in celebrating the courage and resilience of Adina and Corinna, who walk a prophetic path toward equality. We challenge our Church to open its doors to truly listen to their voices and learn from their experiences. God is calling them to lead!
Meet Our 2022 Awardees
Adina Meyer
Corinna Robinson
Adina Meyer
Adina Meyer felt a call to ministry while pursuing an undergraduate degree in philosophy at Bryn Mawr College. She studied New Testament Greek in preparation for applying to divinity school, but after being accepted to Edinburgh University, she took a “thirty year detour,” receiving an M.Litt. in philsophy and spending nearly three decades as a high school humanities and religion teacher.
During this time, she was active in Catholic parishes as a choir member and teacher in the RCIA program, but became discouraged
by the lack of inclusivity in the institutional church.
When Catholic churches in Washington began formally opposing the marriage equality referendum, she attempted unsuccessfully to sever her relationship with the Catholic Church. Fortunately, the following year she attended her first inclusive Mass at the annual gathering of the SOA watch, a group founded by Roy Bourgeois, the Maryknoll priest who was excommunicated for his participation in the ordination of his friend, Janice Sevre-Duszynska. The Mass was co-celebrated by Sevre-Duszynska and Jesuit Fr. Bill Brennan, and for Adina, it felt likec oming home.
Adina began researching Roman Catholic Women Priests online and, after a visit to the Catacombs of Priscilla in Rome where she saw the famous fresco depicting a woman priest, she gathered her courage to
visit Holy Wisdom Inclusive Catholic Community in Olympia, WA, where she is now an active member. Inspired by Roman Catholic Womenpriests Kathleen Bellefeuille-Rice and Diane Whalen, Adina has been accepted as a candidate for ordination with the RCWP. In the fall of 2022 she will begin her third year of an M.Div. program at Portland Seminary in Oregon, with a focus on chaplaincy and spiritual
direction. She hopes to be ordained as a deacon in 2023 and then to the priesthood in 2024, if all goes well.
Adina is the founder of Seattle Inclusive Catholic Community, an organization whose mission is to raise awareness of the varied ways in which Catholics can celebrate the sacraments and to facilitate the
formation of alternative, inclusive communities in the region. Adina also produces the SICC monthly newsletter, Junia’s Journal, and is a member of Cherry Street Village, an interfaith community-based arts
collective in Seattle’s Central District. Adina hopes to gather a “sister community” to Holy Wisdom in Seattle while working as a hospital or hospice chaplain. She is grateful for the support of her husband, Matthew, and her children, Rowan and Jack.
Corinna Robinson
Corinna recently graduated summa cum laude with honors from Florida Southern College, and will begin her first year at Harvard Divinity School this fall. At HDS, Corinna will pursue a Master of Theological Studies with an area of focus in Religion, Literature, and Culture. She plans to examine how women are discussed in scriptural and theological texts, portrayed in iconography, and tell their own stories in religious literature, exploring the effects all these forms
of storytelling have on women’s spiritual and cultural lives.
Growing up in a military family, near-constant moves made change familiar. Each time Corinna’s family moved, her parents chose a new church and often a new denomination, from her father’s Catholic hometown and her Methodist baptism to the West Virginia Baptist summer camp she attended and her mother’s Presbyterian leanings. Throughout such an ecumenical childhood, Corinna displayed an inclination toward theological questions. At age eight, she debated teachings in her catechism class; in high school, she spent her free time reading theology so she would be prepared to challenge her Bible teacher’s biases; and at seventeen, Corinna converted to Greek Orthodoxy after researching the tradition and joining a local parish
community.
As a convert, Corinna was drawn to Orthodoxy’s theology and history, fascinated by the idea of telling the same stories and singing the same hymns as the early Church. She also found, however, a contradiction in the Orthodox Church’s simultaneous venerating of Mary and barring of women from priesthood. It’s common in the community to say “it’s different on the inside,” but this vacillation between honor and discrimination, in which women are confined to a select set of stories, is something with which Corinna struggles. In excluding women from the clergy, Corinna senses that the Orthodox tradition deprives itself of vital perspectives on both God and humanity, weakening both its theology and community.
Over the next year, Corinna will spend time discerning her call to feminist ministry, considering both ordination and service in academia, by pursuing involvement in movements to restore the
female diaconate to Orthodoxy as well as leadership in organizations like Harvard’s Orthodox Christian Fellowship and HDS’s Womanist Book Club. Corinna is deeply grateful to the Women’s Ordination Conference for their generous support, and will continue their mission by using her gifts and voice to uplift other women. In her future vocation, Corinna hopes to challenge her tradition critically and faithfully as she seeks to bring greater equity and compassion for women to her own Eastern Orthodox tradition.
About the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship
Since 2017, the Women’s Ordination Conference has awarded nearly $35,000 to women and non-binary leaders discerning their ministry.
Meet our past scholarship recipientsWho was Lucile Murray Durkin? Support the scholarship fund