The Revd Professor David Brown writes:
BORN in Stockport, Ann Loades was brought up by her mother, who made ends meet by also working as a full-time nurse. The house was without books, but a scholarship to Hulme Grammar School, in Oldham (where she became head girl) ensured that she learnt from influential teachers, who encouraged her to apply to study her favourite subject at the University of Durham.
To her considerable disappointment, the all-male staff there had what seemed to her an unnecessarily restricted, not to say narrowly academic, view of theology. Graduate work from 1963 to 1965 at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, however, opened her eyes to an alternative vision, in the subject’s social and political dimensions. These were reflected on her return to Durham, where she was to remain throughout her career, battling to secure for theology wider and more interesting perspectives.
For the most part, she did not engage with the conventional research monograph; so it would be easy to underestimate her considerable contribution over the past sixty years. In her view, the traditional practice of theology had spent too much time navel-gazing, focusing on internally generated disputes. Even Kingsley Barrett and Charles Cranfield, former tutors and distinguished academics, who became firm friends, were no exceptions. Barrett was a powerful weekly preacher and Cranfield was fired by a passionate concern for social justice; but neither allowed such wider questions to make a direct impact on their lectures.
This led to Ann’s insistence on a rather different view of the nature of academic theology. One way in which this was seen was in her encouraging students to engage with how religion appears in the arts — now a fashionable topic, but then seen as very much on the margins. She pursued this mostly through consideration of novels and poetry. But ballet also secured a significant mention, not least through her personal experience of teaching ballet, week by week in Newcastle, as the main expert in the north-east on the Cecchetti method. Danseuse is actually the title of a recent film on YouTube about her work.
That attempt to reach a wider public was well demonstrated by the energy that she expended on an impressive series of lectures given in 1993, in the cathedral, to mark the 900th anniversary of the laying of the present building’s foundation stone.
Another such area was questions of spirituality and liturgy. Even today, they are commonly relegated to seminary discussion, but Ann thought them of central significance in conceiving of the nature of the theological task. In so doing, she did not look only to great figures of the past. Spiritual Classics of the Late Twentieth Century (1994) was one of her best-known books. But, perhaps as might have been expected, she was also an early voice in feminist theology.
Her approach matured into her Scott Holland Lectures of 1987 and her major monograph, Feminist Theology: Voices from the past (1990), in which she demonstrates how the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft, Josephine Butler, and Dorothy L. Sayers might form a critique of contemporary attitudes. A linked concern was perceptions of the Virgin Mary. What particularly roused her ire was male emphasis on the “virtue” of Mary’s humility when nothing comparable was demanded of men.
Such wider aims found expression in her time as Editor of Theology (1991-97) and during the seven years that she served on the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England (1995-2002). She proved a shrewd critic of the manipulation of doctrine for cultural ends; but her warnings were not always heeded. When, in 2005, she became the first female president of SST (the Society for the Study of Theology), she took the opportunity to warn colleagues of the need for a firm and innovative response to the steady decline in university applications. Little was done.
In some ways, her significance was better recognised by those outside the field. During the 1980s, she had her own TV show. In 1995, she became the first woman appointed CBE for services to theology (the only other person ever given a similar accolade was Charlie Moule). That same year, she became the first female member of the Chapter of Durham Cathedral.
In 2008, she retired to St Andrews, where she was given an honorary professorship and participated regularly in some research supervision, as well as the weekly seminar of ITIA (Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts). She liked nothing better than to entertain students to a meal in her home, or have a coffee locally.
She also continued to engage in writing, and, in her last few years, she produced a spate of short books, including one in the My Theology series, which sketches her own intellectual development, significantly entitled The Serendipity of Life’s Encounters (Books, 25 February 2022).
Divine grace received through the actions of others was one of Ann’s great themes. Exchanges of Grace was the title of her 1998 Festschrift, while Grace and Glory in One Another’s Faces was her title for a collection of meditations from 2020. Grace no less characterised her own style and actions. Larger than life, “a force of nature”, she could be intimidating, but, behind the apparent sharpness, one knew that there always lay real concern for the other.
Although she has left behind neither children nor close relatives, her continuing influence runs deep in former colleagues and students, as well as in a significant number of godchildren.
