Sarah Coakley

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.

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 her profile gained a level of international prominence. Indeed, at the time of her appointment to the Norris–Hulse chair in Cambridge, Coakley had not published a monograph subsequent to the 1988 publication of her doctoral thesis. She has been working on a four-volume systematic theology, the first volume of which was published in 2013 as God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay 'On the Trinity.

Coakley delivered the Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 2012.

In 2012, she was involved in an unsuccessful attempt to change Church of England rules to allow women to become bishops.

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).

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 assists with the morning office and Eucharist. (Note: as at June 2019, Ely Cathedral no longer lists Coakley as an honorary canon.)

Coakley has taught at Lancaster University (1976–1991), at Oriel College, Oxford (1991–1993), and at 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 stepped down as Norris–Hulse Professor in 2018 and was made professor emeritus. She has been an honorary professor of the University of St Andrews since 2018, and a visiting professorial fellow at the Australian Catholic University since 2019.

In 1975, Coakley married J. F. Coakley, a Syriac scholar and fine printer. They have two daughters, Edith Coakley Stowe and Agnes Coakley Cox, who attended Buckingham Browne & Nichols school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her brother is a legal adviser to Prince Charles. Her father, a wealthy lawyer and bon viveur, died in September 2016.

Sarah Anne Coakley FBA (born 1951) is an English Anglican systematic theologian and philosopher of religion with interdisciplinary interests. She is an honorary professor at the Logos Institute, the University of St Andrews, after she stepped down as Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity (2007–2018) at the University of Cambridge. She is also Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Australian Catholic University, both in Melbourne and in Rome.

Born Sarah Anne Furber on 10 September 1951 into a wealthy family of lawyers in Blackheath, London, Coakley attended Blackheath High School. Following this, she spent a gap 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).