The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential female people in Religious Studies,
#1
Rosemary Radford Ruether
#2172
Overall Influence
1936 - 2022 (86 years)
Rosemary Radford Ruether was an American feminist scholar and Roman Catholic theologian known for her significant contributions to the fields of feminist theology and ecofeminist theology. Her teaching and her writings helped establish these areas of theology as distinct fields of study; she is recognized as one of the first scholars to bring women's perspectives on Christian theology into mainstream academic discourse. She was active in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and her own work was influenced by liberation and black theologies. She taught at Howard University for ten years, and later at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary.
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Wendy Doniger
#829
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty is an American Indologist whose professional career has spanned five decades. A scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions, her major works include The Hindus: An Alternative History; Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of Siva; Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts; and The Rig Veda: An Anthology, 108 Hymns Translated from the Sanskrit. She is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and has taught there since 1978. S...
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Mother Teresa
#172
Overall Influence
1910 - 1997 (87 years)
Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu MC , better known as Mother Teresa, was an Albanian-Indian Catholic nun and the founder of the Missionaries of Charity. Born in Skopje, then part of the Ottoman Empire, at the age of 18 she moved to Ireland and later to India, where she lived most of her life. On 4 September 2016, she was canonised by the Catholic Church as Saint Teresa of Calcutta. The anniversary of her death, 5 September, is her feast day.
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Karen Armstrong
#1801
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Karen Armstrong is a British author and commentator of Irish Catholic descent known for her books on comparative religion. A former Roman Catholic religious sister, she went from a conservative to a more liberal and mystical Christian faith. She attended St Anne's College, Oxford, while in the convent and majored in English. She left the convent in 1969. Her work focuses on commonalities of the major religions, such as the importance of compassion and the Golden Rule.
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Kathy Keller
#6822
Overall Influence
Kathy Louise Keller is an author, lecturer, church founder, and Christian theologian from New York City who has appeared on the New York Times best seller list. She was the wife of pastor Tim Keller of New York's Redeemer Presbyterian Church, which the former couple then co-founded.
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Mary Daly
#1807
Overall Influence
1928 - 2010 (82 years)
Mary Daly was an American radical feminist philosopher, and theologian. Daly, who described herself as a "radical lesbian feminist", taught at the Jesuit-run Boston College for 33 years. Once a practicing Roman Catholic, she had disavowed Christianity by the early 1970s. Daly retired from Boston College in 1999, after violating university policy by refusing to allow male students in her advanced women's studies classes. She allowed male students in her introductory class and privately tutored those who wanted to take advanced classes.
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Jan Nattier
#13618
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jan Nattier is an American scholar of Mahāyana Buddhism. Early life and education She earned her PhD in Inner Asian and Altaic Studies from Harvard University , and subsequently taught at the University of Hawaii , Stanford University , and Indiana University . She then worked as a research professor at the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University before retiring from her position there and beginning a series of visiting professorships at various universities in the U.S.
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Dorothee Sölle
#8370
Overall Influence
1929 - 2003 (74 years)
Dorothee Steffensky-Sölle , known as Dorothee Sölle, was a German liberation theologian who coined the term "Christofascism". She was born in Cologne and died at a conference in Göppingen from cardiac arrest.
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Ann Taves
#7153
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Ann Taves is Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a former president of the American Academy of Religion . From July 2005–December 2017, she held the Cordana Chair in Catholic Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Taves is especially known for her work Religious Experience Reconsidered , stressing the importance of the findings and theoretical foundations of cognitive science for modern religionists.
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Sallie McFague
#7293
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Sallie McFague was an American feminist Christian theologian, best known for her analysis of how metaphor lies at the heart of how Christians may speak about God. She applied this approach, in particular, to ecological issues, writing extensively on care for the Earth as if it were God's "body". She was Distinguished Theologian in Residence at the Vancouver School of Theology, British Columbia, Canada.
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Barbara Aland
#16115
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Barbara Aland, née Ehlers is a German theologian and was a professor of New Testament Research and Church History at Westphalian Wilhelms-University of Münster until 2002. Biography After having completed her degree of Theology and Classical Philology in Frankfurt, Marburg and Kiel she received the PhD in 1964 in Frankfurt/Germany. In 1969 she gained her licentiate at the "Oriental Faculty" of Pontificio Istituto Biblico in Rome, Italy. In 1972 she could habilitate in Göttingen about the Syrian gnostic Bardesanes of Edessa. Since 1972 she acted as private lecturer, later on she became profe...
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Antje Jackelén
#18378
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Antje Jackelén is archbishop emerita and primate emerita of the Church of Sweden, the national church. On 15 October 2013, she was elected the 70th Archbishop of Uppsala and formally received through a service in Uppsala Cathedral on 15 June 2014, making her Sweden's first foreign-born archbishop since the 12th century, and the first female archbishop.
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Rita Gross
#12563
Overall Influence
1943 - 2015 (72 years)
Rita M. Gross was an American Buddhist feminist scholar of religions and author. Before retiring, she was Professor of Comparative Studies in Religion at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. In 1974 Gross was named the head of Women and Religion, a newly created section of the American Academy of Religion. She earned her PhD in 1975 from the University of Chicago in History of Religions, with the dissertation "Exclusion and Participation: The Role of Women in Aboriginal Australian Religion." This was the first dissertation ever on women's studies in religion. In 1976 she published the ar...
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Francesca Stavrakopoulou
#14088
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Francesca Stavrakopoulou is a British biblical scholar and broadcaster. She is currently Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at the University of Exeter. The main focus of her research is on the Hebrew Bible, and on Israelite and Judahite history and religion.
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Margaret Barker
#20311
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Margaret Barker is a British Methodist preacher and biblical scholar. She studied theology at the University of Cambridge, after which she has devoted her life to research in ancient Christianity. She has developed an approach to biblical studies known as Temple Theology.
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Christine Hayes
#13894
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Christine Hayes is an American academic and scholar of Jewish studies, currently serving as the Sterling Professor of Religious Studies in Classical Judaica at Yale University, specializing in Talmudic and Midrashic studies and Classical Judaica.
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Phyllis Trible
#11400
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Phyllis Trible is a feminist biblical scholar from Richmond, Virginia, United States. Trible's scholarship focuses on the Hebrew Bible and she is noted for her prominent influence on feminist biblical interpretation. Trible has written a multitude of books on interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, and has lectured around the world, including the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Canada, and a number of countries in Europe.
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Judith Plaskow
#12665
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Judith Plaskow is an American theologian, author, and activist known for being the first Jewish feminist theologian. After earning her doctorate at Yale University, she taught at Manhattan College for thirty-two years before becoming a professor emerita. She was one of the creators of the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion and was its editor for the first ten years. She also helped to create B'not Esh, a Jewish feminist group that heavily inspired her writing, and a feminist section of the American Academy of Religion, an organization of which she was president in 1998.
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Teresa Forcades
#18557
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Teresa Forcades i Vila is a Catalan physician, Benedictine nun and social activist. Forcades i Vila is known for her outspoken and sometimes controversial views on the church, public health and Catalan independence, and for her vaccine skepticism.
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Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
#16814
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza is a Romanian-born German, Roman Catholic feminist theologian, who is currently the Krister Stendahl Research Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. Life Elisabeth Schüssler was born on April 17, 1938, in Cenad, a locality in the Banat region of the Kingdom of Romania, where she belonged to the Banat Swabian German-speaking Catholic population of an ethnically mixed community. As the Russian army advanced through Romania in late 1944, she and her parents fled to southern Germany. They subsequently moved to Frankfurt, where she attended local schools. Sh...
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Eta Linnemann
#20245
Overall Influence
1926 - 2009 (83 years)
Eta Linnemann was a German Protestant theologian. In her last years, she broke completely with the theology of her teacher Rudolf Bultmann. Life Eta Linnemann studied Protestant theology in Marburg, Tübingen and Göttingen from October 1948 to July 1953. She passed her first and second state examinations in August 1953 and in August 1957, respectively. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hanover commissioned Linnemann to write interpretations of biblical texts for religious education. From this work arose her dissertation on the parables of Jesus - Gleichnisse Jesu, Einführung und Auslegung - w...
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Renita J. Weems
#23756
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Renita J. Weems is an American Protestant biblical scholar, theologian, author and clergywoman. She is the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in Old Testament studies in this country. She was influenced by the move in the last half of the 20th century which argues that context matters and shapes our scholarship and understanding of truth. She is best known for her significant contribution to womanist theology, feminist studies in religion and black religious thought. She is recognized as one of the first scholars to bring black women's ways of reading and interpreting the Bible into mainstream academic discourse.
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Mona Siddiqui
#12525
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Mona Siddiqui is a British academic. She is Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at the University of Edinburgh, a member of the Commission on Scottish Devolution and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. She is also a regular contributor to Thought for the Day, Sunday and The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4, and to The Times, The Scotsman, The Guardian, Sunday Herald.
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Marcella Althaus-Reid
#29329
Overall Influence
1952 - 2009 (57 years)
Marcella Maria Althaus-Reid was Professor of Contextual Theology at New College, the University of Edinburgh. When appointed, she was the only woman professor of theology at a Scottish University and the first woman professor of theology at New College in its 160-year history.
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Amy-Jill Levine
#22124
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Amy-Jill Levine is Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace. She is committed to eliminating antisemitic, sexist, and homophobic theologies.
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Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki
#20498
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki is an author and United Methodist professor emerita of theology at Claremont School of Theology. She is also co-director of the Center for Process Studies at Claremont. Suchocki earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in philosophy from Pomona College in 1970 and both Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in religion from Claremont Graduate School in 1974. She taught at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary from 1977 to 1983. From 1983 to 1990 she was professor of systematic theology and dean of Wesley Theological Seminary. In 1990 Suchocki returned to Claremont School...
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Linda Woodhead
#11782
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Linda Jane Pauline Woodhead is a British sociologist of religion and scholar of religious studies at King's College London Faculty of Arts and Humanities. She is best known for her work on religious change since the 1980s, and for initiating public debates about faith. She has been described by Matthew Taylor, head of the Royal Society of Arts, as "one of the world's leading experts on religion".
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Ivone Gebara
#20123
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Ivone Gebara is a Brazilian Catholic nun, philosopher, and feminist theologian. She is notable for her writing on ecofeminism. Biography Ivone Gebara was born in São Paulo on December 9, 1944 to a family of Syrian-Lebanese descent. After receiving a degree in philosophy, she joined the Augustinian Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady in 1967 at the age of 22. She has two doctorates, one earned from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo in philosophy in 1975 and another from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium in religious sciences in 1998.
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Kathryn Tanner
#26704
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Kathryn Eileen Tanner is an American theologian who serves as Frederick Marquand Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School. Biography Born on March 29, 1957, Tanner earned her BA, MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees from Yale University. Her career began at Yale by teaching for the department of religious studies. She later moved to the University of Chicago where she served as the Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Theology. Afterwards, she returned to teach at her alma mater.
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Riffat Hassan
#9206
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Riffat Hassan is a Pakistani-American theologian and a leading Islamic feminist scholar of the Qur'an. Early life and career Hassan was born in Lahore, Pakistan, to an upper-class Sayid Muslim family. Hassan's maternal grandfather was Hakim Ahmad Shuja, a Pakistani poet, writer and playwright. She lived a comfortable childhood, but was affected by the conflict between her father's traditional views and her mother's nonconformism. For most of her life, she hated her father's traditionalism because of his views of sex roles, but she later came to appreciate it because of his kindness and compassion.
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Delores S. Williams
#14107
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Delores Seneva Williams was an American Presbyterian theologian and professor notable for her formative role in the development of womanist theology and best known for her book Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. Her writings use black women's experiences as epistemological sources, and she is known for her womanist critique of atonement theories. As opposed to feminist theology, predominantly practiced by white women, and black theology, predominantly practiced by black men, Williams argued that black women's experiences generate critical theological insights and q...
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Catherine Wessinger
#12239
Overall Influence
Catherine Wessinger is an American religion scholar. She is the Rev. H. James Yamauchi, S.J. Professor of the History of Religions at Loyola University New Orleans where she teaches religious studies with a main research focus on millennialism, new religions, women and religion, and religions of India. Wessinger is co-general editor of Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions. She served as a consultant to federal law enforcement during the Montana Freemen standoff and has been cited for her expertise concerning the Branch Davidians and other apocalyptic groups. She is ...
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Catherine Pickstock
#12687
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Catherine Jane Crozier Pickstock is an English philosophical theologian. Best known for her contributions to the radical orthodoxy movement, she has been Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge since 2018 and a fellow and tutor of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. She was previously Professor of Metaphysics and Poetics.
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Candida Moss
#16606
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Candida R. Moss is an English public intellectual, journalist, New Testament scholar and historian of Christianity, and as of 2017, the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham. A graduate of Oxford and Yale universities, Moss specialises in the study of the New Testament, with a focus on the subject of martyrdom in early Christianity, as well as other topics from the New Testament and early Church History. She is the winner of a number of awards relating to her research and writing.
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Lamya Kaddor
#19055
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Lamya Kaddor is a German writer and scholar of Islamic studies of Syrian ancestry who has been serving as a member of the German Bundestag since the 2021 elections. She is the founder and chairwoman of the Liberal-Islamic Association and is known for introducing Islamic education into German public schools.
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Sarah Coakley
#15710
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Sarah Anne Coakley is an English Anglican priest, systematic theologian and philosopher of religion with interdisciplinary interests. She is an honorary professor at the Logos Institute, the University of St Andrews, after she stepped down as Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. She is also a visiting professorial fellow at the Australian Catholic University, both in Melbourne and Rome.
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Nancey Murphy
#10977
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Nancey Murphy is an American philosopher and theologian who is Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA. She received the B.A. from Creighton University in 1973, the Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 1980, and the Th.D. from the Graduate Theological Union in 1987.
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Emilie Townes
#14668
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Emilie Maureen Townes is an American Christian social ethicist and theologian. She is currently Dean and E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School. Townes was the first African-American woman to be elected president of the American Academy of Religion in 2008 and served as president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion from 2012–2016.
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Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley
#26788
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley is an American religious studies scholar and historian of religion known for her work on Mandaeism and Gnosticism. She was a former Professor of Religion at Bowdoin College. She is known for translating the Scroll of Exalted Kingship and other Mandaean texts, as well as for her various books on the Mandaean religion and people.
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Laurie L. Patton
#9257
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Laurie L. Patton is an American academic, author, and poet who serves as the 17th president of Middlebury College. Early life and education Patton was raised in Danvers, Massachusetts, and graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Harvard University, a doctorate from the University of Chicago, and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in 2000.
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Margot Käßmann
#16924
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Margot Käßmann is a Lutheran theologian, who was Landesbischöfin of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Hanover in Germany. On 28 October 2009, she was also elected to lead the Protestant Church in Germany, a federation of Protestant church bodies in Germany. She stepped down from both offices on 24 February 2010 following a drink-driving incident. After serving as a "Reformation Ambassador" for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, she retired in 2018.
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Birgit Meyer
#35809
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Birgit Meyer is a German professor of religious studies at Utrecht University. Career Meyer was born on 21 March 1960 in Emden, Germany. She studied comparative religion, pedagogy, and cultural anthropology at the University of Bremen and the University of Amsterdam. She earned her PhD at the latter university in 1995 under doctoral advisors J. Fabian and H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen, with a thesis titled: Translating the Devil. An African Appropriation of Pietist Protestantism. The Case of the Peki Ewe, 1847–1992. She was appointed as professor of religious studies at Utrecht University in 2011....
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Janet Gyatso
#35588
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Janet Gyatso is a Religious Studies scholar currently employed as the Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies and the Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs at Harvard Divinity School. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Gyatso's research interests are in Buddhism and its relationship to Tibetan and South Asian civilizations.
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Carol Harris-Shapiro
#26264
Overall Influence
Carol Harris-Shapiro is a lecturer at Temple University in the Intellectual Heritage Department. She has written a controversial book on Messianic Judaism, a belief system considered by most Christians and Jews to be a form of Christianity, adhered to by groups that seek to combine Christianity and Judaism.
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Rachel Adler
#17595
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Rachel Adler is Professor Emerita of Modern Jewish Thought and Judaism and Gender at Hebrew Union College, at the Los Angeles campus. Adler was one of the first theologians to integrate feminist perspectives and concerns into Jewish texts and the renewal of Jewish law and ethics. Her approach to God is Levinasian and her approach to gender is constructivist.
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Elizabeth Moberly
#14314
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Elizabeth Moberly is a British research psychologist and theologian. Moberly is the author of Homosexuality: A New Christian Ethic, in which she suggests several possible causes of male homosexuality and a therapeutic cure.
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Diana L. Eck
#23335
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Diana L. Eck is a scholar of religious studies who is Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies at Harvard University, as well as a former faculty dean of Lowell House and the Director of The Pluralism Project at Harvard. Among other works, she is the author of Banaras, City of Light, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras, A New Religious America: How a Christian Country Became the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation, and "India: A Sacred Geography." At Harvard, she is in the Department of South Asian Studies, the Committee on the Study of Religion, and is also a member of the Faculty of Divinity.
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Catherine LaCugna
#53408
Overall Influence
1952 - 1997 (45 years)
Catherine Mowry LaCugna was a feminist Catholic theologian and author of God For Us. LaCugna's aim was to make the doctrine of the Trinity relevant to the everyday life of modern Christians. LaCugna earned her bachelor's degree at Seattle University, her Masters and Doctorate at Fordham University, and joined the faculty at University of Notre Dame in 1981. There, she taught systematic theology to graduate and undergraduate students, eventually holding the Nancy Reeves Dreux Chair of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.
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Deidre Palmer
#34719
Overall Influence
Deidre Palmer was the President of the Uniting Church in Australia from 8 July 2018 until 17 July 2021. She is a counsellor, theologian, and social worker. She was the Moderator of the Uniting Church's Synod of South Australia from 2013 to 2016.
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Livia Kohn
#20524
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Livia Kohn is an emeritus professor of Religion and East Asian Studies at Boston University, specializing in studies of Taoism . Kohn completed her Ph.D. at Bonn University in 1980. She has held academic positions at Kyoto University , University of Michigan , and Boston University . Kohn has authored or edited over 50 books and many articles on Daoism. She has served as an executive editor of Three Pines Press since 2000 and the Journal of Daoist Studies since 2008. Kohn is a multilingual scholar and has written or translated works in German, English, Chinese, and Japanese.
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