Essays Anglican and Analytic: Explorations in Critical Catholicism

Preface

When I wrote most of the essays in this volume, it did not occur to me that they might one day be drawn together into a collection. This was partly because several of them were written early in my academic career; partly because they were composed for various occasions and exemplify different rhetorical approaches and genres; and partly because they range over such a wide diversity of topics. But one July in Sewanee, while out for a Sunday afternoon walk, I suddenly realized, rather to my surprise, that several essays focused either on Austin Farrer or David Brown interlocked sufficiently on the twin issues of Anglican identity and philosophical/theological method to form the core of a book, and that the way they often engaged with other figures added to their potential interest for a wider readership. I subsequently realized that including my essay on William Alston (one of those who initially pointed me back to Farrer); the coauthored essay on David Brown, Sarah Coakley, and David Ford; my presentation of the hagiological argument; and a new conclusion on what I had previously dubbed Critical Catholicism added up to a plausible volume.

I am thus grateful to the original journals and presses for allowing me to republish the material here; for Ben King and Jason Fout for agreeing to include our coauthored piece; for Eerdmans and the Templeton Religion Trust for working with me on this project; and for Pollyanne Frantz and Connie Patton for administering the Templeton grant on Sewanee’s end. However, note that the opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Templeton Religion Trust.

The essays were put in their final shape and the introduction and conclusion written while I was on a 2023–2024 sabbatical (funded partially by Sewanee and partially by the Templeton grant) as a visiting scholar at Vanderbilt Divinity School. I am thus also grateful to that distinguished academic community for its hospitality, and in particular for stimulating conversations with Bruce Morrill, SJ, and Paul DeHart. And I am deeply indebted for all that I have learned from both the writings and the persons of Eleonore Stump and the late Ann Loades, which is why this volume is codedicated to them. I hope that it bears witness to their equally remarkable but quite different ways of bringing philosophy and theology together in the context of Christian faith and discipleship.

Robert MacSwain, OGS

Nashville, Tennessee

The Feast of George Herbert, 2024

Introduction

Since beginning my academic career almost twenty years ago, my primary research interests have been in both philosophy of religion and Anglican theology.¹ I was of course aware that a Venn diagram would display considerable overlap between these two areas, in that many distinguished philosophers of religion were also Anglicans. However, at some point it occurred to me that this familiar combination of discipline and denomination was not a coincidence. That is, I realized not only that (1) the Anglican tradition is hospitable to philosophical reflection, which was obvious enough, but also that (2) at least some philosophical work by Anglicans might also be considered as specifically Anglican thought and perhaps even as a form of Anglican theology. And while both of these points are worth further reflection, the second one seems to need more emphasis at the present moment.²

I. Between Anglican Theology and Analytic Philosophy

To begin with the first point, Anglicans have historically valued human reason as a divine gift to be celebrated and used with a degree of confidence that may surprise and even dismay Christians of other affiliations. Leading representatives of this tendency include Richard Hooker, the Cambridge Platonists, John Locke, Joseph Butler, and John Henry Newman before his conversion to Roman Catholicism.³ While Anglicans certainly do not deny human sinfulness or the doctrine of the Fall of humanity, or the need for divine revelation through authoritative Scripture, when it comes to our mental capacities they have tended to side with their optimistic Catholic inheritance rather than the more pessimistic followers of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Karl Barth. Reason in the Anglican tradition is often understood as participation in the divine image, the imago Dei (Gen. 1:27); as the candle of the LORD in the soul (Prov. 20:27); or even as the very logos of Christ, the light which enlightens everyone (John 1:9).

This Anglican cognitive confidence has implications for both moral and natural theology, and thus for both secular ethics and epistemology, and it has had significant consequences when it comes to the critical study of the Bible and the dialogue between religion and science. But it is also true that, unlike many Roman Catholics (especially among previous generations), Anglicans have tended to avoid embracing specific metaphysical systems, theories, or conclusions as constitutive of what it means to be an Anglican. So while Anglicans are happy to employ philosophical methods within theological reflection, they normally do so with a degree of reverent agnosticism about the deliverances of such methods. It has also been argued that Anglicans tend toward inductive rather than deductive modes of thought, and emphasize probabilistic cumulative arguments rather than formal demonstrations leading to cognitive certainty. In thus treading a line between Catholic optimism and Protestant pessimism, Anglicanism may be understood as an epistemological via media as well as an ecclesial one.⁴

In regard to the second point above, the field of Anglican studies is fairly new and still organizing itself in regard to method and content.⁵ While both Anglican and non-Anglican scholars have of course explored aspects of the Anglican tradition for centuries, these studies have tended to focus on privileged national churches such as the Church of England or the Episcopal Church in the United States, classic figures such as Lancelot Andrewes or Jeremy Taylor, definitive texts such as the Book of Common Prayer and its variants, and have been largely historical in nature. By contrast, Anglican studies seeks to be more thematically inclusive and methodologically interdisciplinary. Anglican studies takes a broader view of what counts as worth investigating, endorses a more global perspective on the Anglican diaspora, and employs a wider range of academic techniques than most previous approaches, up to and including the social sciences. Inevitably, Anglican studies is much interested in the postcolonial legacy of the British Empire and how churches of the Anglican Communion in Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas both reflect and refract that problematic heritage. Furthermore, intersectional analyses have finally brought to the fore long-neglected issues of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation.⁶

I will return to Anglican studies in a moment, but first, what about Anglican theology? Anglican theology as such has mostly been studied by other Anglicans, and mainly by those preparing for ordained ministry, which means that its details are basically unknown and thus uninfluential outside the clergy of the tradition.⁷ However, and speaking as one myself, Anglican clerics tend to be notoriously insouciant on doctrinal matters. This characteristic conceptual vagueness (woolly is our preferred if rueful term for it) may be partly explained by a pervasive distaste for making up one’s mind, or latitudinarian indifference, or even skeptical doubt, but is also partly because many Anglicans are self-consciously committed to holding the doctrines of what they call the undivided Church. By this they mean the beliefs of the orthodox Christian community of the first five centuries AD as articulated in the early ecumenical creeds and councils, before the Great Schism between East and West in 1054. Such Anglicans are therefore less interested in engaging explicitly with important postpatristic developments such as Scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the rise of modern science. Indeed, in the early nineteenth century the history of doctrine as taught at Oxford ended with the Council of Chalcedon in 451! Please note: the idea that Anglicanism is committed solely to patristic consensus is the story that many Anglicans like to tell themselves, even if the historical reality was rather different. For instance, Anglicans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were arguably more Protestant than patristic.⁸

Partly as a result of this common self-understanding, Anglicans have been remarkably reluctant—almost on principle—to practice what other traditions call systematic theology, or to engage in creative constructive doctrinal projects. Scholarly energies within Anglicanism have rather focused on biblical studies, church history (especially the patristic period), and liturgy, and in these fields Anglican have long produced scholars of international renown and major influence. But there is no single defining figure of Anglican theology such as Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, or John Wesley, and only rarely have Anglicans in any period or region fielded practitioners of the sort of normative theological reflection that is common within Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and other Christian traditions. As mentioned above, scholars in these other traditions therefore rarely engage with Anglican theology, as in their view there is little Anglican theology to engage with.⁹

Furthermore, aside from the ancient English universities of Oxford and Cambridge, along with important later centers such as Durham University and King’s College, London, Anglicans have rarely established research-oriented universities in which theological scholarship can flourish and be passed along to doctoral students. In the United States, for instance, there is no Anglican research university to be compared with Catholic institutions such as Georgetown or Notre Dame, Methodist institutions such as Duke or Emory, or Presbyterian institutions such as Princeton Theological Seminary (which is not a university but which has a respected PhD program). Consequently, the only Anglican graduate schools of theology in the United States are a handful of comparatively small denominational seminaries (such as the one where I teach) whose primary raison d’être is training clergy rather than forming doctoral students. Such seminaries offer a range of master’s degrees and perhaps the professional doctor of ministry, but not a PhD or ThD. Aspiring Anglican theologians in the United States often study at one of these Episcopal seminaries but must then look elsewhere for their doctoral formation, either at home or abroad (I, for example, followed a common path and went to Great Britain). In short, aside from some notable exceptions, Anglican theology largely lacks both clear exemplars and strong institutions.¹⁰

It is precisely in the midst of this comparatively weak conceptual and institutional context that I now return to my proposal in the second point mentioned above, namely, that at least some philosophical work by Anglicans might also fall under the broader rubric of Anglican thought or even theology. Or, put differently, among the genres that the new field of Anglican studies recognizes as constitutive of Anglicanism and among the methods that it employs to explore the Anglican tradition should also be included philosophy. If so, then to the standard list of distinguished Anglican divines could be added not just those from the recent past and present whose academic appointments were or are in seminaries and university departments of theology, such as Michael Ramsey, John Macquarrie, Stephen Sykes, Rowan Williams, David Ford, Kathryn Tanner, Mark McIntosh, Ellen Charry, Katherine Sonderegger, and Kelly Brown Douglas, but those whose teaching and research are more specifically philosophical in nature.¹¹ Such names would include Donald MacKinnon, Basil Mitchell, George Grant, William Alston, Marilyn McCord Adams, William Wainwright, Peter van Inwagen, Douglas Hedley, and Charles Taliaferro, among others, as well as those who perhaps more equally fuse both philosophy and theology such as Austin Farrer, Eric Mascall, Helen Oppenheimer, Brian Hebblethwaite, Keith Ward, Ann Loades, David Brown, and Sarah Coakley. For here, in striking contrast to the general situation in systematic and constructive theology described above, philosophically minded Anglicans have made very substantial contributions over the past several decades.¹²

Such a proposal immediately raises the question, But what kind of philosophy are we talking about? The aforementioned Peter van Inwagen, one of the world’s leading metaphysicians and philosophers of religion, once sagely observed: Philosophers do not agree about anything to speak of.¹³ This lack of agreement includes the very nature of philosophy itself and how to go about doing it. In addition to the main schools of Anglo-American philosophy—namely, the broad analytic tradition, various forms of pragmatism, and the powerful lingering influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein—there are multiple strands of Continental thought emanating from France, Germany, and Italy: phenomenology, structuralism, deconstructionism, critical theory, and so on. Roman Catholic and Orthodox philosophers still look to classic figures in their own traditions such as Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory Palamas, but often put them into conversation with more recent schools of thought mentioned above. Furthermore, the same postcolonial and intersectional lenses that focused their critique on the Anglican tradition have also turned their gaze to Western philosophy, assessing it as exclusively Eurocentric, masculinist, and oppressively hegemonic in its sources, methods, and assumptions. Academic philosophy must, such critics urge, expand its conceptual horizons to include African, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and other intellectual traditions such as various indigenous cultures, along with the voices of women, persons of color, and other minorities, including sexual ones.

Such ferment in the field notwithstanding, and to the chagrin of some observers, philosophers in the Anglican tradition since the mid-twentieth century have largely but not exclusively still positioned themselves in relation to the changing currents of specifically English philosophy. The Hegelian metaphysical idealism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century exemplified by T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley gave way to the severely logical and empirical approach of figures such as Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, A. J. Ayer, and the early Wittgenstein (an Austrian based at Cambridge), and then to the ordinary language philosophers partly inspired by the later Wittgenstein such as J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, H. P. Grice, and Peter Strawson. The initial positivist phase of this revolutionary development was equally hostile to metaphysics, ethics, and theology, as was famously proclaimed by Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic in 1936.¹⁴ However, toward the end of the twentieth century all three of these discourses were gradually if grudgingly allowed back into the philosophical conversation, and what counts as analytic has become increasingly diffuse. Furthermore, recent studies have emphasized the previously neglected but essential work of Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley.¹⁵ But for better or worse, those who came to be known as analytic philosophers set the tone and agenda of what counted as philosophy in the United Kingdom during this period, and then eventually in the United States, Canada, and other parts of the Anglophone world as well.

However, by contrast, many British theologians in the twentieth century rejected decisively these strictures and looked instead to the Continent for both theological and philosophical inspiration. Among them are important contemporary Anglican figures such as John Milbank, Graham Ward, and Catherine Pickstock, who collectively founded the movement known as Radical Orthodoxy in the late 1990s, and I will return to them at the conclusion of this volume. But as the main title of this book indicates, I am here interested primarily in exploring the ways in which some Anglican philosophers and philosophical theologians rather chose to work within the conceptual parameters of analytic philosophy, whether explicitly or implicitly, in either basic agreement or disagreement. Put differently, what they mean by philosophy in its current mode is analytic philosophy. Not all of the essays collected here are purely philosophical in nature, but they all deal with Anglicans who wrestled with how to respond to the powerful challenge that analytic philosophy presented to traditional Christian belief and practice.¹⁶ And to that extent this volume stands squarely within the tradition begun by a group known as the Metaphysicals and exemplified in their book Faith and Logic: Oxford Essays in Philosophical Theology, edited by Basil Mitchell (London: Allen & Unwin, 1957). My own title, however, alludes more specifically to an earlier volume, Essays Catholic and Critical: By Members of the Anglican Communion, edited by Edward Gordon Selwyn (London: SPCK, originally published in 1926, with the third edition appearing in 1929). As I explain further below, I endorse a renewed Critical Catholicism (or post–Liberal Catholicism) as an ecumenical theological project that cuts across various Christian traditions, not just Anglicanism.

Before looking at the essays themselves, let me address a significant divide within contemporary analytic philosophy that has also manifested itself within philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. As alluded to above, rather than monolithic, analytic philosophy is internally diverse, and there are lively debates about what precisely its defining methods and canonical figures consist of, as well as just what makes it different from other approaches. The recent movement known as Analytic Theology has been drawn to a vision of analytic philosophy that—as William J. Abraham put it—values clarity, precision, logical dexterity, probability lattices, and no metaphors please. It employs formal logic and confirmation theory and is often written in a highly technical style that seeks to exclude ambiguity to the greatest extent possible. Abraham locates this approach primarily within North America and associates it with philosophers in the Reformed tradition such as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff and their many students, but a British figure such as Richard Swinburne (originally Anglican, now Orthodox) belongs very much in this group as well. Because of Plantinga’s immense influence in shaping this school of thought, Abraham humorously dubs it the strand of St. Alvin, and it is currently the dominant approach in Analytic Theology.¹⁷

However, Abraham observes that a rather different type of analytic philosophy of religion originated in the book Faith and Logic mentioned above, which he dubs the strand of St. Basil, after its editor. And of this strand he observes:

The canon of exemplars is different: Basil Mitchell, John Lucas, I. M. Crombie, M. B. Foster, and Austin Farrer, for starters. The site of operations is different: Oxbridge and various outposts. The theological heritage in which it originates is different: Anglo-Catholic Anglican, and Arminian. The canon of literature is different: start with Faith and Logic and the material subsequently published by the authors included. So too are the methodological strategies and the prized intellectual virtues. Consider the following laundry list of maxims: Pay attention to the historical etiology of our concepts, allow for the possibility of open as opposed to closed concepts, be especially aware of essentially contested concepts, make ample use of parable and apt metaphor, avoid convoluted imaginary examples, write in a way that allows access to those interested in the big questions that motivate philosophical inquiry, cultivate wisdom and other informal intellectual virtues, and allow elbow room for growth in insight and spiritual perception.¹⁸

I will say more about Analytic Theology in the conclusion of this volume, but note that while my opening chapter on William Alston as an analytic Anglican predated the arrival of this movement by several years, Alston may be regarded not simply as a prime exemplar of the first approach but also as a mediating figure between these two strands, as indicated by his stated appreciation of Crombie, Farrer, and Mitchell.¹⁹ However, the subsequent essays on Farrer and Brown, and my own methodological preferences, belong very much in Abraham’s second group. In these collected essays I look primarily to the United Kingdom and Anglo-Catholicism for both philosophical and theological insight, and so this book may be regarded as contributing to the strand of St. Basil.²⁰ Due to the postcolonial and intersectional concerns mentioned above, this avowedly Anglophile approach is both risky and controversial, which I will discuss further in the conclusion.

II. Anglican and Analytic Essays

In turning then to the chapters themselves, let me comment on their origin and place within the context of this current volume. They are arranged in rough chronological order of publication but are also sequenced to move from a primary focus on Austin Farrer (1904–1968) to David Brown (1948–), in many ways Farrer’s natural successor in representing a particular kind of Anglican philosophical theology I call Critical Catholicism. Brown, like Farrer, studied both philosophy and theology at Oxford, was ordained in the Church of England, and held a joint position as chaplain, tutor, and fellow of an Oxford college. More significantly, however, Brown follows closely in Farrer’s footsteps by seeking to integrate the three major intellectual tasks of biblical interpretation, philosophical analysis, and theological reflection in the context of Anglo-Catholic doctrine and devotion, and in so doing exemplifies at least one form of Critical Catholicism.²¹

The first chapter is one of the earliest pieces in this collection and began its life as a review essay in Anglican Theological Review, published in 2006. It is the only essay focused entirely on an American figure; and given Anglicanism’s strongly clerical nature, it is noteworthy that Alston was a lay member of the Episcopal Church rather than a deacon, priest, or bishop. While it accomplished my primary goals of telling Alston’s story and presenting his distinctive analytic/Anglican methodology, the word limit imposed on the review essay format required me to then simply list the theological topics on which he had written and provide the references rather than go into the doctrinal substance of his work in any more detail. I regretted this, as I particularly wanted to draw further attention to his interesting proposed via media between the classical theism of Thomas Aquinas and the process theology of Charles Hartshorne (Alston’s doctoral supervisor at the University of Chicago). Most adherents of either school assume them to be package deals in which, when it comes to the standard list of divine attributes, one must go entirely with Aquinas’s classical traditionalism or with Hartshorne’s neoclassical revisionism (in which God is temporal, changing, of limited power and knowledge, must create the universe, and so on). Alston, however, argues that it is possible to take a more nuanced perspective, finding value in selected aspects of each thinker’s system.

To achieve this goal, he first divides the standard list of divine attributes into two groups, which he naturally designates 1 and 2. As he summarizes his subsequent argument at the conclusion of the essay:

Group 1 contains such classical attributes as absoluteness (construed as absence of internal relatedness), total necessity, pure actuality, and simplicity—along with their neoclassical counterparts, relativity, contingency, etc. Group 2 contains such classical attributes as creation ex nihilo, omnipotence, incorporeality, nontemporality, and absolute unsurpassability, along with their neoclassical counterparts. The neoclassical position on Group 1 does not entail the neoclassical position on Group 2, though it is, of course, consistent with it. On the contrary, the neoclassical Group 1 attributes can be combined with the classical Group 2 attributes into a consistent and coherent conception that captures the experience, belief, and practice of the high theistic religions better than either of Hartshorne’s total packages [that is, his interpretation of Aquinas and his own counterproposal].²²

In other words, it is at least possible to conceive of God’s nature as exemplifying some classical attributes and some neoclassical attributes. While Alston does not here explicitly argue for the truth of this middle way between Aquinas and Hartshorne, he clearly finds it attractive and worth further consideration. Because of the considerable passage of time, which has sadly included Alston’s death, the text of this essay has been revised to bring it up to date.²³

While also originally published in 2006, chapter 2 is the earliest essay in this collection, beginning its life in a course with Timothy Sedgwick at Virginia Theological Seminary during a year of Anglican studies in 1999–2000. I had been introduced to the work of Austin Farrer several years earlier by Diogenes Allen at Princeton Theological Seminary, and then later wrote on Farrer and Wittgenstein in a paper for Fergus Kerr, OP, at New College, Edinburgh, but this essay was my initial attempt to grapple with Farrer as a paradigmatic Anglican theologian. Tim encouraged me to publish it, and several years later when I was a PhD student at Durham University and chaplain at St. Chad’s College, I finally decided to submit a revised version to the newly founded Journal of Anglican Studies.

My location in Durham during this time allowed me to share a draft of the essay with Stephen Sykes (1939–2014), then principal of St. John’s College, and the author of the highly influential volume The Integrity of Anglicanism (London: Mowbray, 1978). Conversation with him was helpful as I continued to wrestle with the problem of Anglican identity as formulated by Paul Avis: That is, is Anglican distinctiveness a matter of method (how Anglicans do theology, which Avis defends) or content (the material positions that Anglicans take, which Sykes preferred)? That is, what makes Anglicanism Anglican and different from other forms of Christianity—if indeed it is? Here we encounter a pervasive tension between the Anglican self-understanding mentioned earlier about supposedly not holding any distinctive doctrines not shared by other Christians and the more complicated historical reality—although, to be precise, Sykes suggests that we should speak of what is characteristically Anglican rather than what is distinctively Anglican. In the conclusion of the essay I avoid the Avis/Sykes dilemma by arguing that Anglican identity is not an either/or but must rather involve both method and content, and that in particular it was how Farrer put the various material ingredients together that made him a distinctively (or at least characteristically) Anglican theologian. As Scott MacDougall later put it, "it is in examining the combination of [material ingredients], the way that they interact … that allows one to perceive whether a typically Anglican theological imagination is at work or not."²⁴ Anglican identity might thus best be understood as a particular sensibility, an ethos as much as anything else.²⁵ MacDougall’s generative proposal expresses my attempted point more clearly than I did in 2006 and is worth further investigation.

Chapter 3 emerged as a historical/biographical side project while doing a PhD in philosophical theology. As I will explain further below, I had gone to Durham in 2004 to work with David Brown on Austin Farrer as a doctrinal theologian in the Anglican tradition, although my research eventually took an unexpected detour into religious epistemology. But in reading Philip Curtis’s biography of Farrer, A Hawk among Sparrows (London: SPCK, 1985), I became intrigued by a subtle but apparent lacuna: not just the specific date and location of Farrer’s baptism in the Church of England during his first year as an Oxford undergraduate, but Austin’s whole side of the correspondence with his Baptist parents during this difficult period was missing from Curtis’s account. In working through the Farrer papers held in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, I was thus surprised and delighted to discover Austin’s unpublished letters tucked away in a box of uncatalogued material. Why Curtis did not have access to them is unclear, but presumably they were either lost or kept separately until after he finished his biography.

However, Farrer’s baptismal record remained frustratingly elusive until an experienced archivist suggested that I look at his ordination materials. These were kept in Wakefield, Yorkshire, and I might have never managed to visit them had I not been stranded in England after a conference in Manchester due to the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull on April 14, 2010. Taking advantage of the unanticipated time and proximity, I went to Wakefield and discovered the surprising and ironic facts of the case. In terms of genre, note that this essay mostly consists of the transcribed letters between Austin and his parents. Because the initial research in the Bodleian was supported by a grant from the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church in 2008, the article was eventually published in their journal, Anglican and Episcopal History.

Chapter 4 was the result of an invitation to give a paper at the Oxford University C. S. Lewis Society on April 29, 2008. At this point I was still at Durham as both college chaplain and doctoral student, but another side project during this time was coediting The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis (eventually published in 2010) with Michael Ward, then chaplain at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Michael had recently completed a doctorate at St. Andrews that was soon to appear as Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis.²⁶ Like many others, I had read, enjoyed, and benefited greatly from Lewis’s voluminous writings across multiple genres since I was a child, but unlike Michael, I was not a professional Lewis scholar. How this volume thus came to be is a story for another occasion,²⁷ but it is relevant to note that as a matter of fact I had, like most people, first heard of Farrer through his close friendship with Lewis, his involvement with Lewis’s Socratic Club, his ministrations to Joy Lewis at the end of her life, and his posthumous tributes to Lewis. These details are included in the standard Lewis biographies, but when asked to present a paper to the Oxford society because of my involvement with the forthcoming Cambridge Companion, I realized that no one had yet looked more closely at the Lewis/Farrer relationship. The paper was published in the society’s journal, which later became the Journal of Inklings Studies.

Chapter 5 came from an invitation to contribute to a Festschrift for Ann Loades, who sadly passed away on December 6, 2022. As noted above, I went to Durham to work with David Brown, but a wonderful side benefit was getting to know Ann as well. She had retired from full-time teaching the year before I arrived but remained a major intellectual presence and a formidable (yet also kind and generous) force to be reckoned with. Among her many areas of expertise she was also a Farrer scholar, and conversations with her greatly enriched my research and thinking about these matters, as well as far more broadly, which is why this current book is codedicated to her.²⁸ As soon as I was asked by Natalie Watson if I would contribute to a volume in Ann’s honor, I immediately knew what I wanted to write about and the personal anecdote I would begin with. This essay also enabled me to perhaps incongruously bring together Austin Farrer with Stanley Hauerwas, another contributor to Ann’s Festschrift, who had also been a