Episode 17: Anna Rowlands

Interview Date: 6 August 2020. Interviewer: Dr Jason Clark. Research and questions by Dr Simon Machin.

A cultural and practising Catholic who grew up in the Irish diaspora community in Greater Manchester, Professor Anna Rowlands, is St Hilda Professor of Catholic Social Thought and Practice at the University of Durham. A political theologian, she is the author of the forthcoming book ‘Towards a Politics of Communion: Catholic Social Teaching in Dark Times’ (Bloomsbury), co-author of ’T&T Clark Reader in Political Theology (T&T Clark) and co-editor of a forthcoming book ‘Oxford Handbook of Religion and Contemporary Migration’ (OUP). She is a researcher on the AHRC/ESRC project Refugee Hosts (www.refugeehosts.org).

Professor Rowlands combines innovative research with a deep engagement with contemporary catholic communities, most recently with the Jesuit Refugee Service UK. She is a member of the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University and Founding Chair of the Centre for Catholic Social Thought and Practice. She is a trustee of the William Leech Fellowship in the North East of England, the incoming chair of trustees of The Woman at the Well, a London-based charity that works with women whose lives are affected by prostitution. and a Director of the University of Notre Dame London Gateway.

Professor Rowlands has recently written on the politics of Brexit and COVID-19 from the perspective of her long-standing interest in the works of the Jewish thinkers Hannah Arendt, Gillian Rose, and, most specifically, Simone Weil.

Anna Rowlands - Timed Interview Summary

0:00 - 28:05​

Family ancestry and childhood. Anna’s roots lie in a fairly standard tale of Irish migration from impoverished rural lives to new lives in America or the North of England. Her grandparents were part of the diaspora that came to the Manchester area.  Threeof her grandparents were unable to finish school and it is unclear if the fourth was able to, but her parents, although from working class homes, were given an extraordinarily high-quality Catholic education, which enabled them to become teachers.  Her one English grandfather converted to Catholicism when he married Anna’s grandmother. She observes how families without any outward conflict can grow apart in ways which can be difficult to negotiate as the younger generations gain access to the education denied to the older generations. Alcohol and Catholicism. Paternal grandfather struggled with alcohol dependency, scarring his life, a highly intelligent man who was unable to fulfil his potential. Anna attributes these insights to sparking her interest in philosophy, politics and literature.  Whilst still interested in teenage clubbing and going out, her intellectual life tends to be separate from her friendships. A bit of a solitary path: the importance of libraries to her intellectual development. Her widely-read father is extremely encouraging, but as a classicist he regards her interest in contemporary topics with a degree of humour and mockery. The family talk about the impact of gaining access to a local library pass and a huge world of books. Not a massively pious family, but she grows up with the feeling that Catholicism is not something you do for only an hour a week. Parents deeply prayerful and thoughtful with an understanding of how religion and politics have implications for each other. The first time when she realised that this was not how everyone thought, was when she went to Cambridge University.

28:06 - 31:00​

Youthful appearance on Top of the Pops.  Anna attends St Winifred’s Primary School in Stockport, and the music teacher is determined that her choir will appear on Top of the Pops. Anna appears with the choir on a Christmas edition singing with the Nolan Sisters (Shaking Stevens being unavailable).  

31:01 - 44:37​

Cambridge University. Goes to Cambridge from a comprehensive school in Stockport. Never really made the choice for herself, being carried along by enthusiastic teachers; and finds it a huge culture shock in her first term. Attempts to transfer to another university, but falls out with her parents who feel that she is squandering a chance that they never had. Arrives back for the second term, determined to make it work and starts to thrive. Finds that coming from an Irish culture that is very oral is very helpful in an educational system which is verbal and adversarial. Also reads widely, devouring whatever she wants and making connections independently. Having never really had real-life mentors, she finds them in authors. Studies Social and Political Science. Finds some pushback on her Catholicism. Finds herself alienated from the sociological approach that sees secularization as the present and the future. Ironically, it takes an introduction, in Anna’s third year, to Jewish social philosophy (the Frankfurt School) to legitimate a pathway back into Christian social philosophy. At about this time, Jon Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory ispublished, and this helps to provide a language for Anna’s developing ideas, along with Gillian Rose, and a gateway into a more expansive world.

44:38 - 1:01:10​

Post-Cambridge academic life. Having studied social and political science Anna realizes that she needs to study theology. She takes accommodation with a residential Catholic community of sisters and a job in a sixth-form college, whilst undertaking a Masters at Heythrop College, University of London. She becomes a director of pastoral studies and chaplain in a school for those with moderate special needs.    She then moves on to become Director of Pastoral Studies, at Westcott House, Cambridge. Despite the absence of real-life mentors, she starts to piece together the writings and lives of a series of women Jewish intellectuals, Simone Weil, Gillian Rose, Edith Stein and Hannah Arendt, whom she believes belong together, because of a shared set of philosophical concerns. An interest in Gillian Rose had been sparked during her final year at Cambridge. But even up until studying for a doctorate, Anna does not envisage an academic career, as she is fundamentally interest in practices: both the understanding of them and the transformation of them.  She learns a huge amount about what it means to be human from working with those with special needs, and the multiple ways in which the world can be perceived.

1:01:11 - 1:19:23​

PhD, ‘Practical Theology in the Third City’, University of Manchester. On Gillian Rose and her work on the tension between representative cities (heavily influenced by Augustinian theology), Athens, Auschwitz and the New Jerusalem, and the imagining of a “Third City” which is Gillian Rose’s way of talking about the ’broken middle’, the public sphere where social compromises are worked out. The doctorate allows Anna to work out her deep affinity with Gillian Rose, since discovering her work in her undergraduate days: “she wanted to put back together the things I wanted to put back together”. In Anna’s view, there is a tendency in theology to evade the inherent brokenness of the world. Gillian Rose’s concept of the broken middle, the dance and play of ideas, avoids pessimism, but negotiates visions of the good in a more realistic way. Anna has adapted these ideas when teaching Christian social thought to MPs.

1:09:24 - 1:35:37​

Catholic Social Teaching. A term that only really entered Catholic discourse from the 1890s when the Catholic Church begins to talk about social questions and industrial capitalism.  Pope Leo XII’s 1891 social encyclical Rerum Novarum (“On new things”). It is about the living wage, industrialization and the purpose of the economy. It is also a critique of the limits of democracy. It is a tradition of analysis that has carried through several papacies right up until Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ (2015). An encyclical is sometimes inspired by action on the ground in real communities. Christian contemplative social thinking is about seeing oneself in the world in a non-sovereign way.

1:35:38 - 1:51:11

​Simone Weil and The Need for Roots. The French philosopher Simone Weil died young and in exile in England during the Second World War. Anna becomes interested in her late work, The Need for Roots, in the context of Brexit. The necessity of listening beyond divisions to get back to a re-enfranchised national life.The importance of putting down roots in a specific community as against the assumption that uprooting oneself is the only path to follow. A need for public discussion in the “broken middle” of difficult and honest politics.

1:51:12 – 1:59:58​

Simone Weil and suffering. Simone Weil does not have a saccharine view of human existence. Weil thinks that our minds naturally recoil from the reality of suffering because it tears at the sacred core which wants to cling to the common good, or God. The mystical side of Weil finds suffering mysterious, and inexplicable.  Suffering just is. Anna finds this attractive but troubling, as it has to be stated that there is a question about how we understand and think about the role passivity is given in Weil’s thought.  

1:59:59 - 2:13:10

​The displacement of suffering from political discourse.  Anna thinks that the language of both love and of suffering have disappeared from political language. Affliction often feels like a distancing from love. Suffering and love are also wordless, leading us into the place of contemplation, rather than of assertion. Anna was struck during the public conversations about the Covid lockdown how technocratic and mechanistic the language used by politicians was. There is a need for politicians to be honest with the public about the interconnectedness that leadership requires.

2:13:11 - 2:19:09

​Suffering and the premature death of two friends. Two friends of Anna’s, who were postgraduate students when she was at Cambridge University, went on to marry and both died prematurely in their thirties. Many people were marked by their deaths which remain existentially inexplicable. There is still an injustice about what happened, but it is in the face of an outpouring of divine love and hospitality.

2:19:10 - 2:24:18​

Anna’s relationship to her own Catholicism. Sometimes institutions do an injustice to their own communities. Most obvious issues for Anna are the sexual abuse crisis and the institutional complicity in it, and the failure of discernment in allowing the gifts of women to flourish. She has no doctrinal conflict. The liturgy remains central. For herself she continues to believe in a Christian life inside the Church, remaining invested in the fragile broken attempt to build community within it.  

2:24:19 – 2:29:24 ​

Life in the North and Northernness.  There is no such thing as the North in the way that it is often thought about as a Southern construction. It is more complicated than that, since the North-West and North-East are very different, and the cities and the countryside are culturally divergent. However, where there is a tie is the sense of a distance from power, from metropolitan life, from where decisions are made. This drove the Brexit vote. There is massive creative potential in the regions which has to be tapped.

2:29:25 - 2:34:04

​What Catholicism has provided. Everything that Anna has done has been an outworking of her Catholic identity, out of the identity she was gifted with. Catholicism has provided Anna with a strong sense of belonging, and she would not overplay an outsider status. Catholicism has given a stability enabling Anna to stand outside things. It has been a very fertile place. ​

2:34:05 - 2:37:44

​An accidental academic. Anna is committed to the academy as long as it is generative and a hospitable place. Anna has no idea where she will be in ten years’ time, but she is quite at peace with that.