Continually searching for lost coins: Ann Loades, Christian feminist theologian

ABSTRACT

This article traces the pathway of Ann Loades’ important relationship with feminist thinking as it impacted on her understanding of Christian theology. Starting from Searching for Lost Coins (1987) – based on the Scott Holland lectures she delivered in 1986 – it considers her own contributions to feminist theology in a Briish context. In part a personal recollection and celebration of her feminism, the article concludes that Loades curates women’s writing about Christianity over the centuries, in terms that tend towards the insights of a 20th century western feminism, informed by the classical disciplines of her theological and philosophical training. It suggests that her purpose in writing and teaching feminist theology is to create resources that will continue to make Christianity – and the Anglican Church – possible for women in a world in which this – with all that particularly feminist-inspired theory, philosophy and activism have uncovered – is looking increasingly problematic.

KEYWORDS:

• Ann Loades
• feminist theology
• theodicy
• theology
• literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ This is not to imply that there was no counter-narrative promoting a different set of concerns available at that time. If we simply consider the case of African American women, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, both writers with a strong interest in the impact of Christianity on the spiritual culture of African American women had been publishing work since the 1970s. bell hooks’ highly influential essay on black women and feminism, Ain’t I a Woman? came out in 1981 and Audre Lorde’s challenge to Mary Daly to read the work of ‘Black women’ (68) before discoursing on female genital mutilation in Africa, was published in Sister Outsider in 1984. Jacquelyn Grant’s White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus also appeared in 1989. Given Ann’s interest in historical women, there are also historical African American Christian women whose stories are of relevance of whom Sojourner Truth and Jarena Lee are only two of the best known. And, in consideration of a world wide Christianity, the absence of references beyond Western Europe and North America, is notable in respect of many other ethnic, racial and cultural communities. I have to say, however, that these are limitations that apply widely to the work of white feminists in the past, including some of my own published work from earlier decades.

² ‘The Pilgrimage of Grace’ is the name given to a popular uprising against the crown, motivated by both economic distress and by Henry VIII’s break from the Pope and his subsequent reordering of the Church, that took place in 1536 and was brutally suppressed.

³ Ann’s final book, Explorations in Twentieth-Century Theology and Philosophy: People Preoccupied with God, edited and introduced by Stephen Burns, was published posthumously in 2023. This book picks up familiar feminist themes and female personalities – Simone Weil, Dorothy Sayers – as well as presenting a fuller account of Evelyn Underhill’s mysticism. But these themes and personalities are evaluated and celebrated as part of a wider picture of twentieth century theology that includes chapters on Austin Farrer, C.S. Lewis (including one on Lewis and gender) and Stephen Sykes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alison Jasper

Alison Jasper is currently an Honorary Research Fellow in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Stirling. She was previously, a senior lecturer in Religion and Gender at the University of Stirling,Faculty of Arts and Humanities,where she was instrumental in setting up its masters programme in gender studies.