ABSTRACT
Sarah Coakley’s work takes place at the intersection of systematic theology, feminist theology and analytic philosophy of religion. Her innovative, yet deeply traditional, theological method is grounded in the practice of contemplative prayer as a practice of unsaying (or un-mastery) that undoes human tendencies towards idolatry. Coakley’s development of a théologie totale, an approach to systematic theology that offers a vision for life as a whole using engagements with disciplines outside theology and focusing especially on artistic forms, is an unchastened claim to the priority of God that rejects, in its own performance of fragmentation (in method and language) and ascesis (through prayer), the outsize versions of the will-to-power that classical systematic theologies have often been accused of offering. Her argument for a specifically Christian, and feminist, form of power-in-vulnerability through kenotic submission to God rejects the aspersions secular feminist theory casts on Christianity while emphasizing the centrality of experience and the body to any Christian theology whatsoever. As a theologian engaged in presenting the rational and affective logic of Christianity in conversation with science, theory and the church, Coakley’s oeuvre moves beyond, without avoiding, the characteristic aporias and contradictions of foundationalism vs. non-foundationalism, modernism vs. post-modernism, systematicity vs. bricolage, and reason vs. suspicion. Ambitious and controversial, contentious and elegant, Coakley’s project stands at the very fore amongst contemporary practitioners of systematic theology in its most expansive sense.
