Sharon D. Welch

Sharon Welch is an activist and writer who currently serves as a board member of the Chicago League of Women Voters and the American Humanist Association. She has held faculty positions at Harvard Divinity School, the University of Missouri-Columbia, and Meadville Lombard Theological School (Unitarian Universalist).

"I think of Welch as the best kind of activist/academic and consider her a role model," said Dr. Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Professor of Theology, Duke Divinity School. "Her recent focus on alternatives to the binary ways of thinking about morality and war/peace initiatives and her honest explorations of the amoral character of religion are truly exciting. That she refuses to romanticize religious traditions, even as she attends with utter seriousness to the possibilities for liberative and humane possibilities for global life give Welch a kind of realistic wisdom unusual for an academic."