Incarnation at Street Level: Mary and the Roman Imagination.
Recently, I had a few interactions with Christians formed in lower-church traditions within the Church, whose seriousness about Scripture and desire for fidelity in interpreting it I deeply respect. Yet I truly struggle with a certain sense of presumption in such conversation when it comes to Mary, mother of Jesus. It is an argument that begins in a context so far removed from Christianity’s Mediterranean origins, far from those places which inherited the apostolic tradition within living memory and instead takes its form in the Northern Europe of the 16th century and reads Scripture merely through those lenses. It is from such a remote place and with a frustrating certainty that these conclusions are then made. The struggle is not in disagreeing but in the confidence in being so removed from a tradition, that we as Anglicans very much treasure (or should, Richard Hooker docet ) and yet providing a narrative so confident despite being historically, culturally, geographically remov...
