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ABSTRACT
This article was invited by the journal on news of the death of Ann Loades (1938–2022), as part of an issue of IJSCC in her honour. My contribution celebrates Ann’s robust and ‘refreshing style’ through her teaching career as one of Britain’s leading theologians, as well as her commitment to worship and the theology of worship which she lived as well as taught.
KEYWORDS:
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Helen Oppenheimer, ‘Grievances’, first published in Theology (1988) and reprinted in Spiritual Classics from the Late Twentieth Century, ed. Ann Loades (London: CHP, 1995), 15.
2 As it happens, including some texts later included in Evil (Problems in Theology 2), ed. Jeff Astley, David Brown and Ann Loades (London: T & T Clark, 2003).
3 J.A.T. Robinson, Honest to God (London: SCM Press, 1963); John Hick, ed., The Myth of God Incarnate (London: SCM Press, 1977). Loades wrote on Robinson in ‘John A. T. Robinson and Christology’, Modern Believing 54, no. 2 (2013): 125–132. She often also expressed appreciation of Robinson’s Liturgy Coming to Life.
4 Ann Loades, Searching for Lost Coins: Explorations in Christianity and Feminism (London: SPCK, 1987).
5 Loades, Searching for Lost Coins, 99. In ‘From Exception to Norm? Women in Theology: The Smith Lecture 2022’, Scottish Episcopal Institute Journal 6, no. 2 (2022): 5–20, Loades outlines the emergence of the possibility of women gaining access to theology in institutions only at a time when severe criticism of Christian theology, such as the post-Christian kind of Mary Daly, was forceful.
6 Loades, Searching for Lost Coins, 5.
7 Loades, Searching for Lost Coins, 39–60. See also Ann Loades, ‘Eucharistic Sacrifice: The Problem of How to Use a Liturgical Metaphor, with Special Reference to Simone Weil’. In Sacrifice and Redemption: Durham Essays in Theology, ed. by Stephen Sykes (Cambridge: CUP 1991), 247–263. This book was published after considerable delay in the editing process, so Loades’s essay is not in fact later than the chapter in Lost Coins. The chapter for the ‘Durham essays’ collection is reprinted in Ann Loades, Explorations in Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy: People Preoccupied with God, ed. by Stephen Burns (London: Anthem Press, 2023).
8 Loades, Searching for Lost Coins, 57.
9 Ann Loades, The Serendipity of Life’s Encounters (My Theology) (London: DLT, 2021), 32–33 of which is about Barrett, as is Explorations in Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy, 170–171.
10 Natalie K. Watson and Stephen Burns, eds, Exchanges of Grace: Essays in Honour of Ann Loades (London: SCM Press, 2008). I have also written about Ann in Stephen Burns, ‘Ann Loades (1938–)’. In Twentieth Century Anglican Theologians: From Evelyn Underhill to Esther Mombo, ed. by Stephen Burns, Bryan Cones and James Tengatenga (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2021), 157–168.
11 Ann Loades and Robert MacSwain, eds, The Truth-seeking Heart: Austin Farrer and His Writings (Canterbury Studies in Spiritual Theology) (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2006). Ann’s essay on Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited, which many years later she held to be one of the favourite things she had written, is republished in Explorations in Twentieth-century Theology and Philosophy, 89–104.
12 Natalie K. Watson and Stephen Burns, ‘A Tribute to Ann Loades’. In Exchanges of Grace, ed. by Watson and Burns, x.
13 For some delightful examples of his own, see David Jasper, ‘Ann Loades: A Personal Reflection, in Thanksgiving’, Scottish Episcopal Institute Journal 6, no. 4 (2022): 7–10.
14 Ann was long appreciative of Helen Oppenheimer and was writing an essay on her when she died. She included Oppenheimer as one of six figures in Spiritual Classics from the Late Twentieth Century, with extracts running 1–45. In her Smith Lecture, Ann, herself first female president of the Society for the Study of Theology (in 2005), defers to Oppenheimer as the first woman to become president of a British society ‘associated with theology’ (in 1985, for Society for the Study of Christian Ethics). See Loades, ‘From Exception to Norm?’
15 Daniel W. Hardy, ‘Theology and Spirituality: A Tribute to Ann Loades’. In Exchanges of Grace, ed. by Watson and Burns, 103.
16 ‘Danseuse’, At the Threshold Films. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2rLZct2oRw&themeRefresh=1 Accessed 27 December 2022.
17 In addition to being the first female president of the Society for the Study of Theology (in 2005), Ann was the first woman (and only second person) to be awarded a CBE medal for ‘services to theology’, and she was given a personal chair at Durham – ‘Professor of Divinity’ – in 1995, 100 years after the university opened all its awards, bar ‘divinity’, to women.
18 Loades, The Serendipity of Life’s Encounters, 10.
19 Ibid., 73.
20 In ‘Danseuse’, she amplifies these images to speak of ‘sticking your neck out’ even if ‘someone wants to chop your head off’.
21 Loades, The Serendipity of Life’s Encounters, 74.
22 Ann Loades, Feminist Theology: Voices from the Past (Oxford: Polity Press, 2000), 1.
23 Loades, ed., Feminist Theology: A Reader (London: SPCK, 1990), 1.
24 See Loades, Feminist Theology: Voices from the Past, 140–166, which followed various contributions on its focal figures through the previous decades. See also Loades, The Serendipity of Life’s Encounters, 73–74. For a sermon from that time, see Ann Loades, Grace and Glory in One Another’s Faces: Preaching and Worship, ed. by Stephen Burns (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2020), 70–74 (the sermon, ‘Suffer the Children’). For a retrospective look back at her work against abuse, see Ann Loades, ‘The Revelation of Abuse: Some Personal Reflections’, Scottish Episcopal Institute Journal 5, no. 1 (2021): 17–30.
25 Ann Loades, ‘Children are Church!’. In Lively Oracles of God: Perspectives on the Bible and Liturgy, ed. by Gordon Jeanes and Bridget Nichols (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2022), 206–226.
26 A version of which was later published: Stephen Burns, Worship in Context: Liturgical Theology, Children and the City (Peterborough: Epworth Press, 2006).
27 Loades, Feminist Theology: Voices from the Past, 1 &c.
28 Loades, ‘From Exception to Norm?’ 12.
29 Ann Loades, ‘Death and Disvalue: Some Reflections on “Sick” Children’. In Hospital Chaplain 93 (1985): 5–11.
30 While chairing she memorably took out her cosmetics kit and mirror from her handbag and did her make up. At St Chad’s College, Durham, sometime in 1991. For a reference to make up in her sermons, see ‘The Face of Christ’ in Loades, Grace and Glory in One Another’s Faces, 80.
31 For this phrase, see Loades, ed. Feminist Theology: A Reader, 1. Another vignette: on a visit to me and my family when we lived in Sydney, she memorably suggested at a meeting of the Movement for the Ordination of Women to which we took her that everyone ‘stop pussyfooting around’ about problems in the notorious Sydney diocese. Sometime in September/October 2011, at St. Luke’s, Enmore.
32 Ann Loades, ‘Women in the Episcopate?’ Anvil: An Anglican Evangelical Journal of Theology and Mission 21 (2004): 113–119.
33 Sayers had a book of this title (London: Gollancz, 1946).
34 Loades, ed., Spiritual Classics from the Late Twentieth Century, vi; Ann Loades, Grace is Not Faceless: Reflections on Mary, ed. by Stephen Burns (London: DLT, 2021), e.g. 68, 93–95, 111, 120–122, 127.
35 Loades, Grace and Glory in One Another’s Faces, 65 (notably from a sermon called ‘Taking a Stand’).
36 Loades, Grace and Glory in One Another’s Faces, 61 (the sermon, ‘Holy Man of Galilee, alluding to 1 Ki. 4.29, at least as rendered in the Jerusalem Bible).
37 Find an illuming comment on appreciation in Oppenheimer, The Sacred Ministry, cited in Spiritual Classics from the Late Twentieth Century, ed. by Loades: the ‘real attempt to grasp what people are trying to do and be, not just to put up with but to see the point of their peculiarities’ (7).
38 At the time of her death, the researchgate.net website (https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Ann-Loades-2134126596, accessed 27 December 2022) refers to 29 reviews in Theology alone while Ann was affiliated in ‘retirement’ with St Andrews University. The list of Ann’s reviews on this website is far from complete.
39 At the time of her death Ann was writing an essay on feminist theology for a Festschrift and wrote to me in a personal email that she wanted to focus on Soskice, whom in her Smith Lecture she calls ‘a redoubtable contributor to constructive discussion of theology’ (‘From Exception to Norm?’ 5). See also Spiritual Classics from the Late Twentieth Century, ed. by Loades, 46–67.
40 A comment she made to me several times over many years, including while we were working on Grace is Not Faceless. Ann was delighted that both Tina Beattie and Janet Martin Soskice wrote in Exchanges of Grace.
41 Robyn Wrigley-Carr, Evelyn Underhill’s Prayerbook (London: SPCK, 2018); Robyn Wrigley-Carr, The Spiritual Formation of Evelyn Underhill (London: SPCK, 2020); Karen O’Donnell, Borken Bodies: Mary, The Eucharist and Trauma (London: SCM Press, 2018); Karen O’Donnell, The Dark Womb: Re-conceiving Theology through Reproductive Loss (London: SCM Press, 2022). On O’Donnell and Wrigley-Carr, see Loades, ‘From Exception to Norm?’ 11, 14, where both are mentioned. On O’Donnell, also Loades, Grace is Not Faceless, 108–110. Ann also published deeply appreciative reviews of these texts.
42 Ann Loades, ‘Some Scottish Episcopal Theologians and the Arts’. In Scottish Episcopal Institute Journal 5.2 (2021): 75–90; Ann Loades, ‘David, George and David: Theologians Artfully Changing Theology’. In The End of the Church? Conversations with the Work of David Jasper, ed. by Bridget Nichols and Nicholas Taylor (Durham: Sacristy Press, 2022), 150–175. In the latter Ann modestly mentions that she herself was supervisor to both Jasper and Pattison only in a footnote (no. 12). I suspect that even this may be the result of gentle editorial pressure, as it is not mentioned at all in the draft of the essay she sent to me.
43 Loades, ‘David, George and David’, 175.
44 Ann Loades, ‘Finding New Sense in the Sacramental’. In The Gestures of God: Explorations in Sacramentality, ed. by Geoffrey Rowell and Christine Hall (London: Continuum, 2004), 164. Loades, Feminist Theology: Voices from the Past, is itself an in depth exploration of the conviction she states in ‘Finding New Sense in the Sacramental’.
45 In Loades, ‘David, George and David’, she makes a particular point of this, though it is not a co-responsibility she associated exclusively with persons ordained to serve the church. For example, in ‘From Exception to Norm?’ she discusses Soskice’s constructive navigations in theology precisely at the time when Daly-esque ‘exodus’ was en vogue. For all that Ann was fast friends with a number of persons in orders, she was also a most trenchant critic of clericalism. See, for example, Loades, ‘Stephen Sykes and Colleagues: Exploring the Problematic Legacy of Power’ in Explorations in Twentieth-century Theology and Philosophy, 161–214.
46 See e.g. Spiritual Classics from the Late Twentieth Century, ed. by Loades, v, on the subjects of her anthology making their own and handing on Christian tradition. See also Loades, Feminist Theology: Voices from the Past, 5, on struggling with Christian tradition while assuming it bestows resources.
47 Hardy, ‘Theology and Spirituality’, 103.
48 On being there, and turning up, see Loades, Grace and Glory in One Another’s Faces, 112; also Loades, ‘Finding New Sense in the Sacramental’, 167.
49 Note, for example Letty Russell, Church in the Round: Feminist Interpretation of Church (Louisville: WJKP, 1993), and discussion in Stephen Burns, ‘“Four in a Vestment?’ Feminist Gesture for Christian Assembly’. In Presiding Like a Woman, ed. by Nicola Slee and Stephen Burns (London: SPCK, 9–19) and Nicola Slee, Fragments for Fractured Times: What Feminist Practical Theology Brings to the Table (London: SCM Press, 2020), 60–78. Durham’s line of blue stone is discussed in Susan White, ‘Finding their Place: Women and the Environment for Worship’ in a special edition of this journal around the theme ‘Women and the Church’ which Ann guest edited: International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 4 (2004): 235–248.
50 Loades, Searching for Lost Coins, 96–97.
51 Loades, ‘Children are Church!’ 212. In some of her last writing Ann notes that human fathers’ experience is neglected with respect to matters of importance being raised by e.g. O’Donnell. E.g. Loades, ‘From Exception to Norm?’ 11–12. Note, though, that Ann chose for her funeral a reading from Julian of Norwich on the motherhood of Christ. Julian – with Margery Kempe – was also the focus of one of Ann’s last publications: ‘Reforming Women in England and Scotland: Claiming Authority to Speak of God. In Contemporary Feminist Theologies: Power, Authority, Love, ed. by Kerrie Handasyde, Cathryn McKinney and Rebekah Pryor (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), 100–118.
52 Loades, ‘Finding New Sense in the Sacramental’, 171; cf. Loades, Grace and Glory in One Another’s Faces, 112.
53 Loades, ‘Finding New Sense in the Sacramental’, 171.
54 Ann Loades, ‘Eucharistic Spirituality’. In The New SCM Dictionary of Christian Spirituality, ed. by Philip Sheldrake (London: SCM Press, 2005), 288.
55 Robert Hovda, Strong, Loving and Wise: Presiding in Liturgy (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1976), 18.
56 Robert Hovda, ‘The Vesting of Liturgical Ministers’. In Robert Hovda: The Amen Corner, ed. by John Baldovin (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1994), 220.
57 Loades, Grace and Glory in One Another’s Faces, 115.
58 See Katharine Massam. ‘Female Saints – Women Saints since 1920: A Wider Circle?’ in Women in Christianity in the Modern Age (1920–Today), ed. by Lisa Isherwood and Megan Clay (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), 83–108.
59 Robert Atwood, ed., Celebrating the Saints: Daily Spiritual Readings for the Calendar of the Church of England (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1998) notes Ann’s help (531). Some of her own reaching around the sanctorale is collected in Loades, Grace and Glory in One Another’s Faces, 117–194.
60 See Ann Loades, ‘Unequivocal Affirmation of the Saving Significance of Gender’. In Presiding Like a Woman, ed. by Slee and Burns, 77–86, and her essay ‘On Gender’ in C.S. Lewis, originally in the Cambridge Companion to Lewis which Rob MacSwain co-edited, and republished in Loades, Explorations in Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy, 63–74.
61 Loades, The Serendipity of Life’s Encounters, 60; cf. 52: ‘hardly a source of illumination for those facing their death’.
62 Her essay on A Grief Observed is collected in Loades, Explorations in Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy, 75–88.
63 Ann Loades, ‘Sacrament’. In Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, ed. by Adrian Hastings et al (Oxford: OUP, 2000), 635.
64 Loades, ‘Finding New Sense in the Sacramental’, 165.
65 Loades, Grace and Glory in One Another’s Faces, 87–99.
66 Karl Rahner, ‘On the Theology of Worship’. In Theological Investigations XIX (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 141–150.
67 Loades, Grace and Glory in One Another’s Faces, 25 (the sermon, ‘Justice and Only Justice’).
68 Loades, Grace and Glory in One Another’s Faces, 26.
69 Ibid.
70 Janet Martin Soskice, ‘Women’s Problems’, cited in Spiritual Classics from the Late Twentieth Century, ed. by Loades, 54. Soskice first published this piece in 1992, and a note on the manuscript of Ann’s sermon suggests it was preached in 1994, when she would also have been at work on Spiritual Classics …
71 Soskice, ‘Women’s Problems’, cited in Spiritual Classics from the Late Twentieth Century, ed. by Loades, 50. Emphasis in original.
72 Loades, Grace and Glory in One Another’s Faces, 78 (the sermon, ‘Wiping Away Tears’).
73 Cited in Ann Loades, ed., Dorothy L. Sayers: Spiritual Writings (London: SPCK, 1993), 159.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Stephen Burns
Stephen Burns is a grateful doctoral supervisee of Ann Loades. He is Professor of Liturgical and Practical Theology at Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia. His recent publications include Twentieth Century Anglican Theologians: From Evelyn Underhill to Esther Mombo (ed. with Bryan Cones and James Tengatenga (Chichester/Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2021), From the Shores of Silence: Explorations in Feminist Practical Theology (ed. with Ashley Cocksworth and Rachel Starr; London: SCM Press, 2023), Feminist Theologies: Interstices and Fractures (ed. with Rebekah Pryor; Lanham, Md.: Lexington Press, 2023), and Conversations about Divine Mystery: Essays in Honour of Gail Ramshaw (ed. with HyeRan Kim-Cragg; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2023), as well, as editor, Ann Loades’s Explorations in Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy: People Preoccupied with God (London: Anthem Press, 2023).