ABSTRACT
Ann Loades’ exploration of sacramentality is extraordinarily wide-ranging in its sense of where the sacramental is to be discovered. It is also rigorously theologically discerning. The matters to which she paid attention may seem unconventional at times, but they are always to be referred to the doctrinal criteria which became most significant in her work: creation, salvation, the communion of saints, the incarnation, and the Trinity. This article considers two sets of evidence – a video interview conducted near the end of Ann’s life in which she meditates on aspects of embodiment through the governing metaphor of dance, and those examples of her writing explicitly addressed to sacramental concerns – as important sources for illuminating her distinctive approach to sacramentality.
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Notes
1 See, for example, the preamble to an essay on children in the context of the Bible and liturgy: Loades, ‘Children are Church’, 206.
2 Loades, ‘Sacramentality and Christian Spirituality’, 254–255.
3 Loades, ‘Table: Sacramental Spirituality’, especially 64–67 and 75–77.
5 Press release accompanying the launch of the videos. I am grateful to Andy Peterson Docs/ology Films [email protected] for permitting the use of quotations from this text.
6 Press release.
7 Loades, My Theology.
8 Burns, ‘Secure among the Mysteries’, 11–12.
9 Loades, ed., Dorothy L. Sayers: Spiritual Writings, 159.
10 Loades, ‘Why Worship?’ 87–99, 92.
11 Loades, ‘Finding New Sense in the Sacramental’, 161.
12 Ibid., 161.
13 Ibid., 161–162.
14 Williams, ‘Foreword’, xiii.
15 Loades, ‘Finding New Sense in the Sacramental’, 162.
16 Loades, Searching for Lost Coins.
17 Sayers, ‘Dante and Charles Williams’, 187. Quoted in Loades, Dorothy L. Sayers, 170.
18 Dante, The Divine Comedy 3: Paradiso Canto XIV, ll. 37–48.
19 Loades, ‘Why Worship?’ 92. She quotes Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, 29.
20 Loades, ‘Why Worship?’ 92.
21 Loades, ‘Table: Sacramental Spirituality’, 63.
22 Cassidy, Living the Story.
23 Loades, ‘The Virgin Mary and the Feminist Quest’, 17–36.
24 Cassidy, ‘Spirituality and the Trinity’, 89–97, 91.
25 Cassidy, ‘Spirituality and the Trinity’, 92.
26 Loades, ‘Regarding Mary and the Trinity', 49–61.
27 Ibid., 59.
28 Loades, ‘Bone of Contention’, 63–73, 67. The essay critically addresses the full ARCIC statement. See Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission, Mary.
29 Loades, ‘Bone of Contention’, 70. See Johnson, Truly Our Sister.
30 Loades, ‘Regarding Mary and the Trinity’, 56. See Williams, ‘“The Seal of Orthodoxy”', 15–29.
31 Loades, ‘Sacramentality and Christian Spirituality’, 259.
32 Loades, ‘The Revelation of Abuse’, 29.
33 McKinnell, ‘Philosophical Plumbing in the Twenty-First Century’, 221.
34 Soskice, ‘Love and Attention’, 59. Soskice quotes Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good, 55.
35 Soskice, ‘Love and Attention’, 66.
36 Ibid., 67.
37 Soskice, `Love and Attention', 67. My emphasis.
38 Soskice, ‘Love and Attention’, 68.
39 Loades, ‘Finding New Sense in the “Sacramental”’, 169.
40 See, for example, Loades, ‘Why Worship?’ 94.
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Bridget Nichols
Bridget Nichols lectures in Anglicanism and Liturgy at the Church of Ireland Theological Institute. Her interests include liturgical language, collects and sacramental theology. Her publications include Liturgical Hermeneutics (Peter Lang, 1996), The Collect in the Churches of the Reformation (SCM, 2010), Lively Oracles of God: Perspectives on the BIble and Liturgy, co-edited with Gordon Jeanes (Liturgical Press, 2022), and The End of the Church? Conversations with the Work of David Jasper, co-edited with Nicholas Taylor (Sacristy Press, 2022).