Grace is not faceless by Ann Loades

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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)

Lively Oracles of God Edited by G Jones and B Nichols

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This is the Alcuin Club’s 2022 book – one of my resolutions for 2026 is to try and catch up on reading these – there are some older than this one on the “to be read” pile.

The thing this collection of essays draws attention to is the fact that most liturgical scholarship is people looking as words on a page, mostly studying past texts, sometimes contemporary prayer books, but rarely thinking about the primary experience of liturgy “heard”.

But as a collection of essays it suffers from repetition – they always do – each chapter provides the context as if unaware that you have just read others on the same theme.

Equally the basic argument of the collection is a simple one, what the people hear is not the same as what the Priest says, let alone what the Priest intends to say.

The study of liturgical text is often done as if the exist in a vacuum – forgetting that during Evensong at Southwark Cathedral the trains rumbling past the window are as loud as the choir.

As a footnote and an aside, there was mention that Justin Welby, while ABC, in the early 2010s felt that those under 35 found the CofE’s resistance to equal marriage not only “incomprehensible” but “wicked” – assuming those people have not had a homophobic epiphany in the meantime those 35yos are now 50

The Solitary Self, Darwin and the Selfish Gene by Mary Midgley

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Mary Midgley offers a critique of the way that Darwin and theory of evolution has been used as an explanation for human interactions – showing that Darwin himself would not have recognised, and would have been very unlikely to put his name to, the “social-Darwinism” or “neo-Darwinism” of Dawkins and others.

Midgley was able to provide me with fresh understanding about the theory of evolution, particularly that “survival of the fitness” is not really evidenced in terms of competition or conflict within species – it is not actually a dog eat dog world (it is a wolf eat lamb world but that is a very different thing…).

This matters because the credibility of much of what Dawkins wants us to believe rests on he linking it to the accolade of Darwin “the scientist”. Take that away and it may not be fatal to Dawkins-ism but it needs to find a new set of foundations.

The other thing that Midgley shows is the concept of the “selfish gene” is flawed, and actually even Dawkins has occasionally expressed regret about that being the characterisation of his theory. The selfish gene was coined as a term at a point when genes were seen as a the answer to everything. We have moved on, genes are now know not to be as deterministic as first thought, and also genes are not the smallest building blocks. Just as at one point atoms were seen as the answer, and now our thinking is all about sub-atomic particles, so interest is pasting towards those things that make up genes. But “neo-Darwinism” has got stuck on genes as the defining feature.

This is a slim volume, a work of “popular” science, not an academic tomb, and so I am sure there are plenty of simplifications that others would pull apart. And just as Midgley critiques Dawkins for killing straw-men of his own making, I am sure Dawkins would defend himself by saying Midgley has attacked not him but a straw-man caricature of him.

Finding Wales by Peter Daniels

  

As a follow up to his book In Search of Welshness I found this a less compelling work, there was some interest in the individual stories of those moving back to Wales after lives lived in England but they didn’t seem to tell a story bigger than the sum of their parts.

That most, like Peter, were moving back in the context of retirement – having moved to England as young adults decades ago in search of (white collar) career opportunities not found in Wales.

Questions of whether the Wales Government and other mostly Cardiff based employers now provide those opportunities is unclear, and does a move from north or rural south Wales to Cardiff actually differ much in term of cultural shifts compared with a move from those places to London are not really explored.

That some might have held their Welshness more strongly as “expats” living in England than they ever would if they had remained in Wales is noted, but what that means upon return, the possibility that they are “too Welsh” or cardboard cut-out in the eyes of the “locals”, is again hinted at but not unpacked.

It felt there was a much more interesting version of this book just beyond reach...

Masculinity: an anthology of modern voices Edited by R Dove, A Kent, and S McPherson

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At 300 pages this is a expansive anthology, giving voice to a rich and wide set of voices.

There is a strong queering of the masculine – owning it not apologetic

I tagged the following:

spit & Sawdust by Simon Alderwick

Sports Bar by Matt Alton

Bestiary of the River of Doubt by Andre Bagoo

Fitter Happier by Ben Banyard

The Last Time by Lewis Wyn Davies

I’m Fine Daragh Fleming

Not to be published poem 2 by Charlie Hounsell

At the Buffalo Irish Center for St. Patrick’s Day by Justin Karcher

Steam Room by James McDermott

Instructions on how to assemble a man by Antony Owen

Losing Love by Sandeep Sandhu

Hey! How are you? By Jack Solloway

This Man by Erich von Hungen

Night Terror by Mick Wood

Kitchen Hymns by Pádraig Ó Tuama

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Pádraig speaks of the darkness and complexity of life in ways that somehow lean into hope, he affirms that life is not easy, and in that affirmation you can face the world

This is an uncomfortable collection – and all the better for that …

I tagged these poems:

In The Name of the Bee

Mother Brendan’s Opening Words at Ash Wednesday Mass

Do You Believe in God? (page 8)

Do You Believe in God? (page 22)

In a Garden by a Gate

A Sword Shall Pierce Your Heart

the words on page 71

The Forward Book of Poetry 2025

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I put tabs on the following poems

The Hebridean Crab Apple by Marjorie Lotfi

ghazal, screaming by Toby Campion

Dear John Berger by Leyla Josephine

What Grief Feels Like to Me by Michael Pedersen

I wanted to show you a donkey in the field or I want to show you the donkey in a field by Lisa Kelly

Dance on My Grave by Amy Acre

An Empty Barn in the Midlands by Eva Bourke

You Wouldn’t Last five Minutes as a Woman by Madailín Burnhope

Snowman by Katie Donovan

The Blood, Oh the Blood by Carrie Etter

Them! By Harry Josephine Giles

We didn’t mean to kill Mr Flynn by Seán Hewitt

Love Poem with Typos by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

The Wild Swans at The Wetlands Centre by Victoria Kennefick

Keeper by Mícheál McCann

The Grief of Creatures by Paula Meehan

Noah’s Ark by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Proofs by Peter Sirr

Ardently Love by Eric Yip