Dr. Sheri Prud’homme is on the core faculty of Starr King School for the Ministry in Oakland, California in the United States where she teaches topics from theology to religious education to church and nonprofit administration. She received a Carpenter Foundation Scholarship for her doctoral work in Interdisciplinary Studies in History and Theology at the Graduate Theological Union. Her dissertation focused on 19th century American Unitarian minister Thomas Starr King’s use of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada as sacred texts, exploring what his understandings of theology and nature might contribute to contemporary ecotheologies as well as offering needed correctives to his imperialist project.
She was ordained as a Unitarian Universalist minister in 2001 and has served as a minister of religious education in several Unitarian Universalist churches in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. She has published several articles at the intersection of history, theology, and nature, and her first book, Gather the Spirit: History of the First Unitarian Church of Oakland, 1869-2000, received the Unitarian Universalist History and Heritage Congregational History Prize.
While on sabbatical from her regular teaching, she is a guest researcher with the Department of Intercultural Theology from January – July 2024. She will be working on publications and collaborations at the intersection of ecotheologies, climate breakdown, and mass migration. She will also be collaborating with Dr. Matthew Ryan Robinson of the Protestant Theology Faculty to organize a colloquium on ecotheologies in the summer semester.