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One of the insights of a collection such as this, drawing together essays written over many years, is the ways in which someone’s thought can develop and yet remain consistent over time.
It is not the case that Ann Loades had one thought on the subject of Mary and repeated it time any again, she seems about to come it freshly on each occasion.
She takes Mary seriously as a focus of study, Mary as Mary, not Mary merely in relation to others. She guides between those that have venerated Mary to the point at which the person is lost and those that (often in reaction to the former) has evicted Mary from their Church and their lives.
When she quotes Karen O’Donnell she sums so much of this up “learning to love Mary’s body meant ‘not relegateing her to a walk-on part in the nativity or the role of silent, weeping mother at the Cross.” Rather it meant learning to love her ‘in the fullness of her embodied experience’, and the bodies all women, as women in the fullness of their embodied experience, all ‘made possible by and as a response to the love of God.” (p110)
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