Introduction: The Grace of Intelligence

Summary

Ann Loades was the first woman to be honoured with a CBE (‘Commander of the British Empire’) medal for ‘services to theology’. She was the first female president of The Society for the Study of Theology. And she was the first woman in any discipline to be given a personal chair (professorship) at Durham University, UK, where she taught from 1975 to 2003. A very well-known figure in British theology, Loades is perhaps known best for her work in feminist theology. Her Feminist Theolog y: A Reader (1990) defined and galvanised the challenge of North Atlantic feminism to both churches and academy. Before that, Searching for Lost Coins (1987) was the first monograph on feminist theology to emerge from an academic in a British theology department, arising as it did from the Scott Holland Lectures. Her major monograph Feminist Theolog y: Voices from the Past (2000) is striking for its distinctive emphasis on ‘enlarged feminism’ – that is, while concerned with women's self-determination, it is no less so with their dependents. Accompanying these books are a raft of articles by Loades arising from her commitments to doing theology through feminist frames.

Over time, however, Professor Loades's work ranged over philosophical theology, theological ethics, sacramental spirituality and the figure of Mary, amongst other themes and foci. Her doctoral studies were in eighteenth-century philosophy and so, naturally, her first publications were on Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and their peers. Nineteenth-century thinkers (with Elizabeth Cady Stanton [1815–1902] and Josephine Butler [1828–1906] especially important to Loades) and then those in the twentieth-century came to prominence in her writing over time, with work on Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) and Austin Farrer (1904–1968) among her many publications. In so far as Underhill and Sayers are remembered and studied in Britain today, this may have much to do with Loades's bringing forward their contributions into view of a new generation of scholars. And of course, although neither Underhill nor Sayers were ‘feminists’, Loades has been keen to praise their efforts in their own time and place to gain a public, use their gifts and speak their minds.