Sarah Anne Coakley (born 1951) is an English Anglican priest, systematic theologian, and philosopher of religion with interdisciplinary interests. She became an honorary professor at the Logos Institute, the University of St Andrews, after retiring from the position of Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity (2007–2018) at the University of Cambridge. She was a visiting professorial fellow (2019-22) then honorary professor at the Australian Catholic University, and an honorary fellow of Oriel College, Oxford.

Early life and education

Born as Sarah Anne Furber on 10 September 1951 in Blackheath, London, Coakley attended Blackheath High School. Following this, she spent a year teaching English and Latin in Lesotho. Her education continued at New Hall (now Murray Edwards College), University of Cambridge (BA, first-class honours, 1973), and at Harvard Divinity School (ThM, 1975), to which she went as a Harkness Fellow. Her PhD on Ernst Troeltsch is also from the University of Cambridge (1983).

Career

Academic career

Coakley has taught at Lancaster University (1976–1991), Oriel College, Oxford (1991–1993), and Harvard University in the divinity school (1993–2007; as Mallinckrodt Professor of Divinity, 1995–2007). She was a visiting professor of religion at Princeton University (2003–2004). In 2006, she was elected the Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge (the first woman appointed to this chair) and took up the position in 2007. In 2011, she became deputy chair of the School of Arts and Humanities with a four-year appointment on the general board of the university. She retired as Norris–Hulse Professor in 2018 and was made professor emeritus. She has been an honorary professor at the Logos Institute and the University of St Andrews since 2018 and a visiting professorial fellow at the Australian Catholic University since 2019. Coakley's teaching and research interests cover a number of disciplines cognate to systematic theology, including the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of science, patristics, feminist theory, and the intersections of law and medicine with religion. Her contributions to these areas have generally been by way of co-ordinating research projects and editing or co-editing collections of papers. It was through these collaborative projects that that her profile initially gained a level of international prominence. At the time of her appointment to the Norris–Hulse chair in Cambridge in 2006, Coakley had published her doctoral thesis and her widely discussed monograph Powers and Submissions. From 2005 to 2008, Coakley co-directed, with Martin A. Nowak, the "Evolution and Theology of Cooperation" project at Harvard University sponsored by the Templeton Foundation, out of which has come a co-edited volume, Evolution, Games, and God: The Principle of Cooperation. An earlier interdisciplinary project on "Pain and Its Transformations", undertaken with Arthur Kleinman at Harvard (as part of the Mind, Brain, Behavior Initiative), produced Pain and Its Transformations: The Interface of Biology and Culture (co-ed. with Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Harvard UP, 2007). She delivered the Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 2012. She holds honorary degrees from Lund University, St Andrews, University of St Michael's College, Toronto, and Heythrop College, London. In July 2019, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Ordained ministry

Coakley was ordained in the Church of England as a deacon in 2000 and as a priest in 2001. She has assisted in parishes in Waban, Massachusetts, and at the Church of St Mary and St Nicholas, Littlemore, Oxford, England (where she served her title). Her training for the priesthood included periods working in a hospital and a prison. In 2011 she was appointed an honorary canon of Ely Cathedral where she assisted with the morning office and Eucharist until 2018. Coakley now lives in the US, but returns to the UK every year for a period in the summer during which she has permission to officiate at St Barnabas Church, Jericho, Oxford. In 2005 Coakley co-founded, with Sam Wells, the Littlemore Group of scholar-priests. The group writes accessible theological texts from the perspective of parish ministry. In 2012, she was invited to speak to the House of Bishops regarding a vote on consecrating women bishops.

Major Themes

Coakley works within the fields of systematic theology and philosophy of religion, along with interdisciplinary work on natural theology with scholars from the fields of biology and mathematics. She writes on Christology, particularly themes around the identity of Christ and apophaticism. Coakley publishes on theology of the body and mystical theology, particularly looking at feminism and postmodern secular culture from this perspective. She is a scholar of Gregory of Nyssa and patristic theology. Most recently, Coakley has been working on a series of systematic theology texts she calls théologie totale, which began with God, Sexuality and the Self published in 2013.

Personal life

Coakley's father, F. Robert Furber, was a lawyer, and her mother, Anne Furber, was a teacher. In 1975, Coakley married James F. Coakley, a Syriac scholar and fine printer. They have two daughters, Edith Coakley Stowe and Agnes Coakley Cox, who are a lawyer and a classical singer. Her mother, Anne Furber, died in July 2015. Her father, the London lawyer F. Robert Furber, died in June 2016.

Published works

Books authored

Books edited

Footnotes