SARAH COAKLEY

University of Cambridge

TAMSIN JONES
University of Victoria

SILENCE, PRAYER, AND DESIRE IN PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICES:

A CONVERSATION WITH SARAH COAKLEY

T
amsin Jones: In an article in Christian Century 1 you speak of spiritual practices, and in
particular, the practice of silent prayer, as “epistemically expansive,” and as having “the power to
change one’s perception of the theological task.” Similarly, in an earlier essay, which considers
some of these themes specifically within the educational context, you bemoan the split between
“theoretical exposition” and “ascetic practice.” 2 It is clear how such practice has been transformative in
your own writing, but can you say whether such practices also constitute part of your own preparation to
teach? To put it another way, do spiritual practices, such as silent prayer, inform how you teach in the
classroom, as well as how you teach through your writing?

Sarah Coakley: This is a very perceptive question (from one who knows me well, warts and
all!). Yes, such ascetic preparation for any important task of attention, assistance to others, or
communication in teaching is potentially hugely transforming—if only we can find time to do
it. (Not that we can manipulate it— we simply make space, gently, for a Gift that comes from
elsewhere.) It is a feature of our obsessive culture of busyness and overwork, however, that
almost anything will get in the way of such a commitment. I find I can only cling on by my
fingertips by making regular dates with others to keep silence together (for 15 years a weekly

1 Sarah Coakely, “Prayer as Crucible: How my mind has changed,” Christian Century 128, no. 6 (March
2011).
2 Sarah Coakley, “Shaping the Field: A Transatlantic Perspective,” ed. David F. Ford, Ben Quash, Janet

Soskice in Fields of Faith: Theology and Religious Studies for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 52.

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 COAKLEY & JONES: Silence, Prayer, Desire 48

silent prayer group at Harvard; now an equivalent weekly event at Westcott House with the
ordinands in Cambridge); and by being accountable also to my own rule of life as a priest to say
my office, pray for others and keep some small element of silence in my life every day (I now
do this on the train between Ely and Cambridge: if you choose the right trains it’s a blessed
space of uncontaminated silence). I have to say, though, that this is a continual uphill struggle,
every day, and I often fail miserably and utterly. I also don’t normally talk about it very much:
it’s frankly better not blazoned about. Having said that, the people close to me always know
when I’m failing in this area, because I then manifestly crash in my sensitivity to others’ needs
and concerns. Every day we start again.

TJ: Would you ever consider asking your students to engage in “spiritual exercises” (to use Hadot’s
term), or include it in the requirements of a course? What would such practices look like? For example,
you have written a great deal about prayer as a “practiced loss of control” —an expansion or
transformation of noetic, affective, and erotic boundaries. How might this play out in the lecture hall,
seminar room, or during office hours?

SC: Again, this is a very subtle question. Much depends on the institutional and political
context as to how one responds. In my own career I have taught, at various times, in a secular
Religious Studies department (at Lancaster University), in a fairly old-fashioned Theology
faculty (at Oxford), at Harvard Divinity School in the midst of major ideological disputes about
‘the study of religion’ and ‘theology,’ and at Cambridge in a Theology and Religious Studies
programme in which both sides happily learn from each other. Each context has been different
and each has called forth different sorts of responses from me. However, I remain wary about
making a “spiritual exercise” any sort of requirement for a course. I know that this is done in
certain seminaries and denominational colleges (e.g, my friend Martin Laird OSA can be seen
on Youtube conducting a class in silent prayer in the context of a course on prayer at Villanova,
and clearly doing it excellently); but personally I would always be wary of requiring such
practice as an element in a course which is graded. What I did at HDS for many years was to
teach courses, which discussed texts on meditation and contemplation (including a big survey
course on “Christian Spirituality”), and simultaneously I quietly ran a silent prayer group each
week. But I never made that a requirement for any course, and it was entirely voluntary. It was
of course also entirely proper that prayer should have been going on in a Divinity School
training people for the ministry! But the Spirit blows where it wills; and only when and if
students were inspired to take up the practice element from their own volition did it work to
talk informally about how such a practice also changed everything—in their work, their life,
their approach to intellectual questions. Each person has to find this out for herself. No one
should be bludgeoned or hurried. In practice people tend to be drawn to it because they sense it
as a sort of magnetic attraction in others’ lives; they think: “That’s what I want to be like.”

TJ: When you put forth an understanding of theology as always being a theology “in via”— or a
“theology on the road,” does this impact the role of the theology professor as the “expert” in the room?

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SC: I like to distinguish between ‘theology’ (proper: talking about God) and what Joep van
Beeck, SJ, once called “theologology” – i.e., talking about talking about God. The latter is what
we induct our students into under the rubric of ‘theology’; but actually we are for the most part
teaching them how to make clever comments on other people’s views about God, not how to
write about God directly in the way that the great theologians have done (think of Origen,
Augustine, Luther). But of course none of us can become Origen, Augustine, or Luther
overnight; and if we encourage students to try and express their own views about God too
quickly we are likely to get some embarrassingly unformed—not to say uninformed—
extravaganzas. So here’s the way I try to steer through this dilemma: first, I try to help students
see how important decisions are made in theological thinking (how criteria of truth and
authority are deployed, how starting points in systematic thinking affect the whole, how
prayer, practice and theological thinking interrelate); then I try to encourage them to ‘cut their
teeth’ theologically by comparing and critiquing these different theological styles; while this is
happening one can hope (but not command) that a process of deepening of wisdom is occurring
simultaneously through their own prayer, life experience, and pastoral and political response.
But none of this can be hurried or compelled. The great theologian is always the one who
presses to integrate all these factors, who is affected by the dictum that “to be perfect is to have
changed often.” But we should not berate ourselves that, in the formative stages of training,
“theologology” is what we’re mainly likely to get. One can nonetheless still hold the vision of
something more profound to aim at before the student body. Insofar as the professor is the
“expert” she is only ever issuing a vade mecum: students will ultimately vote with their feet and
follow the theological trends that most excite and compel them.

TJ: Relatedly, how important is the spiritual “transparency” or “opacity” of the professor in the
classroom? What is the difference in pedagogical practice between a kind of performed neutrality versus
an explicit discussion of one’s faith commitments and spiritual practices (or lack thereof)?

SC: In my view this is a bit of a false disjunction—arising from the current star-wars between
the supposedly “neutral” study of religion, and the supposedly confessional (and anti-
intellectual?) theological confessionalism. The whole idea of such a disjunction rests on an
outmoded neo-Kantian division of “fact” and “value.” In practice, the professor will always
convey (explicitly or implicitly) certain values, commitments or ideologies, even while claiming
to be entirely neutral or “objective.” Some of the most dogmatic views about religion are
thereby conveyed—without the explicit opportunity for critique!

My own way through this is always to present a range of systematic theological options as
sympathetically as possible in each case; but then to make it quite clear why it is that I am
arguing for one over others, at the same time giving students explicit permission to disagree
(and be well graded by disagreeing!). This is an entirely rational procedure (rather in the spirit
of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Giffords); it is neither a performed neutrality nor a lurch into irrational
preferentialism. It maintains the insistence on the possibility of public rational discussion even
about religious matters, which can become extremely emotive.

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TJ: While you agree with the increasingly pervasive challenge to the tired polemical distinction between
the “study of religion” and “theology”—whether through a recognition of the hidden theological
underpinnings of the concept of “religion,” or through a critique of the false disjunction between
commitment and critical judgment—you have argued, nonetheless, that it is important not to dissolve
these two discourses into one. Indeed, you have said that there is a “dialectical frisson” 3 between the two
that is intellectually generative and important to maintain. Does it follow from this that a professor of, for
instance, the history of Christianity (or Buddhist thought, or Islamic law), should have different
pedagogical practices depending on whether they are teaching in a religious studies department, a
divinity school attached to a university, or a seminary?

SC: Yes, as I’ve said above, I do think there is a subtle difference in how one appropriately
speaks and positions oneself in these different contexts. But it’s not a matter of being specious
or gagged or (alternatively) overtly proselytizing in the different contexts. It’s more a matter of
sensitivity to the ethos and goals of the institution and its context, whilst maintaining the
commitment to rational exposition and open discussion just mentioned. But having said that,
when ideology takes over and (say) it is announced in the context of a school historically
dedicated to the training of Protestant ministers that theological discussion must be repressed,
and prayer and praise disallowed or relegated to the realm of the “anti-intellectual,” then
something is awry and a challenge has to be uttered.

TJ: I recall being in the audience when George Steiner gave his Norton Lectures (since published as
Lessons of the Masters) and witnessing the nervous reaction of the Harvard audience to his claims
about the role of erotic attraction in the art of persuasion that constitutes teaching. (To give one example:
“Eroticism, covert or declared, fantasized or enacted, is in-woven in teaching, in the phenomenology of
mastery and discipleship.” 4) As someone who has given sustained attention to the force of the erotic that
can emerge within spiritual practices, as well as the “messy entanglement” of questions of gender and
sexuality with doctrine, what do you think is the role of desire in our pedagogical practices? Ought it to
be cultivated, suppressed, ignored, or acknowledged and controlled?

SC: Acknowledged, certainly. But this is an area of our lives in which we have the most
profound capacity for self-delusion: here be dragons! Educators need to be trained to know the
signs of misuse of such desire in themselves and in others. In practice, however, things often go
way off the rails before anyone blows a whistle. But, on the other side, desire can also be
appropriately, and most subtly and beautifully, directed towards its proper object in theological
teaching. If, by chance, students “catch the halo” of holiness by reading a patristic text, or are
inspired in some inadvertent way by the life and witness of one of their own teachers, then this
is itself enlivening and life-changing: in practice, the great teachers do this all the time, but their
students rarely tell them (if at all) until many, many years later. The oddest thing I have found
in my own life in relation to some people who greatly influenced me is that such life-changing
teaching can sometimes be done by people who are neither the greatest scholars nor the most

3 Coakley, “Shaping the field: a transatlantic perspective,” 54.

4 George Steiner, Lessons of the Masters (Harvard University Press, 2005), 26.

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saintly life exemplars. Again, the Spirit blows where it wills; and again, we fortunately cannot
manipulate this sort of influence merely at will.

In sum, we have to be strongly aware of the sort of power we wield over our students, for good
and ill: alas, they often imitate us. That is why, if we teach well we are always gesturing away
from ourselves to the proper source of Truth. But self-aggrandizement is ever on offer, always
an insidious temptation which students too are glad enough to imitate!

SARAH COAKLEY is the Norris-Hulse Professor in Divinity at the University of Cambridge. She has also been a
member of the Faculty of Harvard Divinity School, Oxford University, and Lancaster University. Author of
numerous monographs, including a four-volume systematic theology, the first volume of which will appear as God,
Sexuality and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press), she most recently delivered
the Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen in 2012. She is an ordained priest in the Church of England.

TAMSIN JONES was Sarah Coakley’s student at Harvard Divinity School and “cut her teeth” as Coakley’s Teaching
Fellow. After three years as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Comparative Study of Religion at Harvard
University, Jones is now teaching in Religious Studies at the University of Victoria. She is the author of A Genealogy
of Marion’s Philosophy of Religion: Apparent Darkness (Indiana University Press, 2011).

© Sarah Coakley and Tamsin Jones.

Coakley, Sarah, and Tamsin Jones. “Silence, Prayer, and Desire in Pedagogical Practices: A Conversation with Sarah
Coakley,” in Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory vol. 12 no. 2 (Fall 2012): 47-51.

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