Sarah Coakley on the Risk and Adventure of Contemplative Prayer

Theologian Sarah Coakley: "If you probe back to what prayer is at base, it is a turning to a source of our being. It's precisely a handing over to that which we can't control by definition. That's what's frightening about it. That's what's scary. The self is being ripped open in ways that reveals depths of feeling and desire that we didn't even know that we had."
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Sarah Coakley is one of the most influential theologians of her generation—trained at Cambridge and Harvard, grounded in patristics, philosophy, and feminist thought. She is known for her integration of systematic theology, contemplative practice, and feminist theory. Coakley has retired from the Norris-Hulse Professorship at Cambridge University, in which role she served from 2007 to 2018. From 2018 she has been an Honorary Professor at the Logos Institute, St Andrews University, and from 2022 an Honorary Professor at the Australian Catholic University (Melbourne and Rome).

She is an Honorary Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, an Emeritus Fellow of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences. She holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Lund, St Andrews, Toronto (St Michael’s College), and London (Heythrop College).

Her widely influential books include God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity (2013), the first volume of a proposed four-part systematic theology, as well as Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (2002) and The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God (2015). Her work draws deeply on the Christian contemplative tradition, especially the notion that vulnerability to God in prayer is a site of intellectual and ethical transformation.

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