The Christian Century

In the late 1980s, Barbara Brown Zikmund lamented the failure of churches prior to the 1960s to understand and help working women, women who had first moved into the workplace during World War II. The indices of the Century during the ’40s and ’50s demonstrate how little attention mainline religion gave to women’s issues during those years.

When I first told friends that David and I were having serious marriage conversations, I expected smiles and congratulations. Instead I observed raised eyebrows and puzzled frowns.

My friends’ first question is understandable. “He lives in Arkansas. You have another two years in New York before you finish your doctoral course work. Won’t you be engaged forever?”

Our plane landed at Gatwick airport on July 7, the day the bombs went off, and the four of us made our way through the mass of bedraggled travelers and machine gun-toting police to the airport bus.

Sarah Coakley came to Harvard in 1993, hired as part of then-dean Ronald Thiemann’s plan to bring more religiously committed faculty to Harvard Divinity School. (Jon Levenson, an Orthodox Jew, was hired at about the same time.) If Thiemann wanted someone who embodied the soul of Anglicanism—both its theological commitments and its style—he could hardly have chosen better.