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,

#251

Isabelle Graesslé

#58933
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Isabelle Graesslé is a French born theologian, feminist and former museum director, based in Geneva. In 2001 she was appointed moderator of ministers and deacons at the Protestant Church of Geneva. The position dates back to 1541 when it was created by John Calvin, but Graesslé, after 460 years, was the first woman to occupy it. In 2004 she was appointed the first director of the International Reformation Museum which opened the next year in Geneva, but she resigned the post in 2016. It was indicated that her departure followed disagreement about levels of funding.
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#252

Maryanne Confoy

#115664
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Maryanne P. Confoy RSC is an Australian religious Sister of Charity who has also been a teacher and scholar, working primarily in the areas of ministry and spirituality. Early life and education Maryanne Confoy was born on 15 April 1944. She joined the Sisters of Charity in Australia, an order established by Mary Aikenhead and whose members have been working in education, health and community care since they first arrived in Australia in 1838. Confoy completed a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne and went on to further postgraduate studies at Boston College and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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#253

Suha Taji-Farouki

#97644
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Suha Taji-Farouki is a specialist in modern Islamic thought. Biography Taji-Farouki completed a BA in Classical Arabic and Islamic Studies with Persian at Durham University in 1987. She obtained her PhD in Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern Politics from the University of Exeter in 1993.
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#254

Inés Talamantez

#110119
Overall Influence
Inés M. Talamantez was an ethnographer and scholar of religion. She was professor of religious studies at University of California, Santa Barbara . She was an expert on Native American religion and philosophy.
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#255

Kathleen Williams

#115268
Overall Influence
Kathleen Williams is an Australian Sister of Mercy and a theologian at the University of Divinity. Education Kathleen Margaret Williams RSM has completed a Bachelor of Arts, a Master of Education , a Master of Theological Studies and a Doctor of Theology.
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#256

Ellen Leonard

#108595
Overall Influence
1933 - 2022 (89 years)
Ellen Margaret Leonard was a Canadian systematic theologian and Roman Catholic religious sister. She published three books on figures important in Roman Catholic modernism, and wrote about feminist and ecological Christologies. She served as the president of the Canadian Theological Society from 1989 to 1990. She entered the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph after high school and worked as a teacher and administrator, prior to earning her PhD and joining the Faculty of Theology at University of St. Michael's College. She received an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Michael's College in 2014.
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#257

Christa Blanke

Christa Blanke
#82682
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Rev. Christa Blanke-Weckbach is a German Lutheran theologian and animal welfare activist. She is the founder of the European animal protection organisation Animals' Angels. From 1995 to 1998 she chaired the animal welfare advisory board of the government of Hesse.
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#258

Ilse Härter

#138136
Overall Influence
1912 - 2012 (100 years)
Ilse Härter was a centenarian German Lutheran theologian. On her thirty-first birthday, in 1943, she was one of the first two women to be ordained in Germany. Life Provenance and early years Ilse Härter was born in Asperden, a small village to the south of Kleve, and positioned within walking distance of the Dutch border. She was the second of her parents' three daughters. The family was not a particularly religious one, and Härter's career choice surprised her parents. She was asked about this later, and recalled a funeral ceremony for an aunt at which the celebrating minister had reassured those present that after three days the dead aunt would be resurrected.
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#259

Marcia Bunge

#44176
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Marcia J. Bunge is an American Lutheran theologian. She is Professor of Religion and the Bernhardson Distinguished Chair of Lutheran Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota. Biography A graduate of St. Olaf College and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Bunge earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, specializing in hermeneutics and historical theology. Before accepting the Bernhardson Chair, she taught at Luther Seminary , Luther College , Gustavus Adolphus College , and Christ College, the Honors College of Valparaiso University . She has also pursued research and been a visiting professor at several academic institutions in Germany.
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#260

Hildegard Goss-Mayr

#58452
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Hildegard Goss-Mayr is an Austrian nonviolent activist and Christian theologian. Life and commitment Daughter of Kaspar Mayr, founder of the Austrian branch of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, she studied Philosophy in Vienna and New Haven. In 1958, she married Jean Goss , a French peace activist; the couple had two children, Myriam and Etienne.
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#261

Eva Mroczek

#150858
Overall Influence
Eva Mroczek is a North American scholar of ancient Judaism, in particular the texts of the Hebrew Bible, Dead Sea Scrolls, and Apocrypha, and Jewish readers' and writers' engagement with these texts. She is the author of The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity .
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#262

Nicola Denzey Lewis

#112272
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Nicola Denzey Lewis is a Canadian academic of lived religion, early Christians, material culture of late antique Roman Empire, and women studies. She is a professor at Claremont Graduate University as the Margo L. Goldsmith Chair in Women's Studies in Religion.
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#263

Shreena Niketa Gandhi

#103225
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Shreena Niketa Gandhi is a historian of religion, race, and empire at Michigan State University. Gandhi’s research demonstrates how American practices of yoga can be understood within the broader history of structural racism in the United States.
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#264

Stephanie Paulsell

#31596
Overall Influence
Stephanie Paulsell is an American theologian, currently the Susan Shallcross Swartz Professor of the Practice of Christian Studies at Harvard Divinity School. Works Lamentations and the Song of Songs: A Theological Commentary on the Bible Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice The Scope of Our Art: The Vocation of the Theological Teacher
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#265

Jorunn Økland

#130326
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Jorunn Økland is a Norwegian gender studies expert and biblical scholar with a background in Classics. She is currently Director at the Norwegian Institute at Athens and Professor of Gender Studies in the Humanities at the University of Oslo , and former Director of its Centre for Gender Research . Her fields of expertise are Pauline Studies, ancient mediterranean material culture, feminist critique of religion, gender and sacred texts, Bible translation, and cultural/secular uses of the Bible.
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#266

Phyllis Granoff

#91842
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Phyllis Emily Granoff is a specialist in Indic religions. In July 2004, she joined Yale University as a Professor of World Religions. She also serves as the editor of the Journal of Indian Philosophy.
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#267

Katharine Massam

#113792
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Katharine Massam is a professor of church history based at the University of Divinity in Melbourne, Australia. Early life and education Katharine Therese Massam grew up in Perth, Western Australia. She completed a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Western Australia and a Diploma of Education at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia, before going on to completing her PhD at the University of Western Australia in 1992. Her doctoral thesis was later published as Sacred Threads: Catholic Spirituality in Australia.
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#268

Elizabeth Mburu

#137921
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Elizabeth W. Mburu is a Kenyan theologian who is a professor of New Testament and Greek at the International Leadership University, Africa International University and Pan Africa Christian University in Nairobi. Her book, African Hermeneutics, seeks to provide a uniquely African approach to interpreting the Bible.
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#269

Linda Hogan

#85275
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Linda F. Hogan is an Irish ethicist, ecumenist and academic, specialising in Christian ethics, political ethics, human rights, gender, and ecumenism. She is Professor of Ecumenics at Trinity College Dublin, where she was also its vice-provost from 2011 to 2016. She worked as a lecturer at the University of Chester and University of Leeds before joining the staff of Trinity College, Dublin.
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#270

Gail R. O'Day

#96266
Overall Influence
1954 - 2018 (64 years)
Gail Radcliffe O'Day was an American biblical scholar. Early life and education O'Day was born in Muhlenberg, New Jersey, on 2 December 1954, while her father Arthur F. O'Day served in the Korean War. Upon the end of his military service, Arthur and his wife Sally Wilcox O'Day moved to her hometown, Scituate, Massachusetts. The family moved to Chappaqua, New York, in 1965, where O'Day was a student at Horace Greeley High School. She earned a bachelor's of arts degree at Brown University in 1976, followed by a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School and a Ph.D. in New Testament from Emory University.
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#271

Khanna Omarkhali

#87147
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (43 years)
Khanna Omarkhali, also known as Khanna Usoyan , is a Yezidi-Kurdish religion researcher. Biography She studied Iranian philology at the Saint Petersburg State University, from where she obtained a Ph.D. in 2006, as well as a BSc in 2002 and a MSc in 2004. In 2005, she joined the University of Göttingen as an Academic Assistant in the DFG project “Cultural memory of the Yezidi community in Germany with regard to religious questions", from 2007 to 2010 she was a bursar of the DFG Graduiertenkolleg 896/2 “Götterbilder - Gottesbilder - Weltbilder”, with the project “Yezidi Religious Texts: Their Theological Implications with some References to the Ahl-e Haqq Religious Tradition”.
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#272

Muriel Orevillo-Montenegro

#143737
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Muriel Orevillo-Montenegro is a Filipina theologian known for her writings in Asian feminist theology. She is a Human Rights activist and Peace and Justice advocate. Biography Orevillo-Montenegro's parents and grandparents were amongst the first generation of Protestant converts in the Philippines.
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#273

Anne Nasimiyu Wasike

#112381
Overall Influence
Sister Anne Nasimiyu Wasike, LSOSF was a Ugandan Catholic theologian, religious sister, and author of books and articles on education, ethics and the empowerment of the poor.  She was also editor of several publications. She was a member of a Franciscan African Order of nuns called "The Little Sisters of St Francis."
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#274

Leah Gaskin Fitchue

Leah Gaskin Fitchue
#142873
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Leah Gaskin Fitchue , also known as Leah Gaskin White and Leah Gaskin Coles, was an American city official, professor of religious studies and college administrator. She was president of Payne Theological Seminary from 2003 to 2015.
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#275

Meredith J. C. Warren

Meredith J. C. Warren
#169124
Overall Influence
Meredith J. C. Warren is a Senior Lecturer in Biblical and Religious Studies at the University of Sheffield. She is known for her views on the New Testament and early Judaism as well as for her media appearances for such outlets as The Washington Post, and BBC radio. She is a Metis citizen of the Manitoba Metis Federation.
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#276

Kathleen Deignan

#126381
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Kathleen P. Deignan, CND, , is an Irish-American theologian, author and songwriter of contemporary liturgical music. A Sister of the Congregation of Notre Dame, she is composer-in-residence for Schola Ministries and is the founding director of the Deignan Institute for Earth and Spirit Institute at Iona College, New York. She previously directed the Iona Institute for Peace and Justice Studies in Ireland. Deignan is a GreenFaith Fellow who completed an intensive training in religious environmental leadership. Her work in this area focuses on the legacy of Father Thomas Berry. She is Emeri...
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#277

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

#51086
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Winnifred F. Sullivan is an American author and a professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington in Bloomington, Indiana, United States. She has taught such courses as The Politics of Religious Freedom, Interpreting Religion, The Trial of Joan of Arc, and Christmas: The Church-State History of the World's Most Popular Holiday. She is also the Affiliate Professor of Law in the Maurer School of Law. Her research primarily focuses on how modern religion has shaped law, the Anthropology of law and a comparative notion between Law and Society. She is on the edito...
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#278

Denise A. Austin

#125678
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Denise A. Austin is an Australian Pentecostal historian, particularly focused on Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. Austin is the Deputy Vice President of Research and Standards, and Professor of History at Alphacrucis College. She is also the Director of the Australasian Pentecostal Studies Centre.
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#279

Janina Hiebel

#128189
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Janina Hiebel is a German-born biblical scholar now residing in Australia who works at the University of Divinity in Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests are in the period of the Babylonian Exile, particularly the book of the prophet Ezekiel.
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#280

Kirsteen Kim

#157810
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Kirsteen Kim is a British theologian and Professor of Theology and World Christianity at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA. Her research interests are Korean Christianity, Pneumatology, and world Christianity.
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#281

Heidrun E. Mader

#28519
Overall Influence
Heidrun E. Mader is a German Protestant theologian and historian of early Christianity and its literature, and a professor at the University of Cologne, Germany, holding a chair of Biblical Literature and its Reception History.
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#282

Agnes Abuom

Agnes Abuom
#78182
Overall Influence
1949 - 2023 (74 years)
Agnes Regina Murei Abuom was a Kenyan Christian organisational worker who served as moderator of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches since 2013. She was the first woman and the first African to hold this post. She represented the Anglican Church of Kenya.
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#283

Gladys Parentelli

#138709
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Gladys Ethel Parentelli Manzino is a Uruguayan feminist theologian and photographer who has lived in Venezuela since 1969. A representative of Latin American ecofeminism, she was one of three Latin American women appointed by Pope Paul VI as observers at the Second Vatican Council.
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#284

Nóirín Ní Riain

#132814
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Nóirín Ní Riain is an Irish singer, writer, teacher, theologian, and authority on Gregorian Chant . She is primarily known for spiritual songs, but also sings Celtic music, sean-nós and Indian songs. Nóirín plays an Indian harmonium , shruti box and feadóg . She was Artist-in-Residence for Wexford and Laois. She performs with her sons Eoin and Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin under the name A.M.E.N. and gives workshops about "Sound as a Spiritual Experience".
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#285

Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan

#144657
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan is an African-American womanist theologian, professor, author, poet, and an elder in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. She is Professor-Emerita of Religion and Women's Studies and Director of Women's Studies at Shaw University Divinity School. She is the author or editor of numerous books, including the volume Women and Christianity in a series on Women and Religion in the World, published by Praeger.
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#286

Jeanne Knoerle

Jeanne Knoerle
#76446
Overall Influence
1928 - 2013 (85 years)
Sister Jeanne Knoerle, S.P., was an author, educator and theologian. A Roman Catholic religious sister, she was a member of the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods. She was president of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College in Indiana from 1968 to 1983. Other posts were with the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities and with the Lilly Endowment.
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#287

Dianne M. Stewart

#168288
Overall Influence
Dianne Marie Stewart is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University. Dr. Stewart's work focuses on religion, culture and African heritage in the Caribbean and the Americas as well as womanist religious thought and praxis. Dianne M. Stewart is the author of Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience , Black Women, Black Love: America’s War on African American Marriage and  Obeah, Orisa and Religious Identity in Trinidad, Volume II, Orisa: Africana Nations and the Power of Black Sacred Imagination .
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#288

Susan Ackerman

#142896
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Susan Ackerman is an American Hebrew Bible scholar. She is Preston H. Kelsey Professor of Religion, Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, where she has taught since 1990. Before coming to Dartmouth she taught at the University of Arizona and Winthrop College in South Carolina. She specializes in the religion of ancient Israel and the religions of Israel's neighbors , especially women's religious history.
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#289

Esther Mombo

#168171
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Esther Mombo is a Kenyan Anglican theologian who teaches church history and theologies from women's perspectives. Biography Born in Birongo village of Kisii County, Kenya to a Seventh-day Adventist father and a Quaker mother, Mombo received a BD from St Paul's United Theological College and an MPhil from the Irish School of Ecumenics of Trinity College Dublin. She returned to Kenya to teach at an Anglican bible college, where she became an Anglican herself. Mombo completed a PhD in 1998 at School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh as part of the Centre for the Study of Christianity in the Non-Western World.
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#290

Smadar Rosensweig

#126022
Overall Influence
Smadar Rosensweig is an adjunct assistant professor of Bible at Yeshiva University's Stern College for Women. Prior to that she served as lecturer of Judaic studies and history at Touro College. Smadar Rosensweig received her B.A. from Barnard College and M.A. from Azrielli Barnard College. She delivers shiurim and lectures extensively throughout the New York metropolitan area.
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#291

Leona G. Running

#126105
Overall Influence
1916 - 2014 (98 years)
Leona Rachel Glidden Running was the first Seventh-day Adventist woman to earn a Doctor of Philosophy in Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She was also the first female to join the faculty of the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary in 1955 at Takoma Park, Maryland, and later when the Seminary relocated to the campus of Andrews University.
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#292

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite

#133947
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite is an author, former president of Chicago Theological Seminary, a syndicated columnist, ordained minister, activist, theologian, and translator of the Bible. She is currently an emeritus faculty member at Chicago Theological Seminary. She also spent some of her time serving as a trustee for different organizations.
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#293

Mary Ann Beavis

#160563
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Mary Ann Beavis is a professor emerita, St. Thomas More College, the University of Saskatchewan. She co-founded the peer-reviewed academic journal, S/HE: An International Journal of Goddess Studies, together with Helen Hye-Sook Hwang in 2021.
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#294

Catherine Hezser

#92235
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Catherine Hezser is Professor of Jewish Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She specialises in rabbinic Judaism, the early history of Judaism in the Near Middle East, and the social history of the Jews in Roman Palestine during late antiquity.
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#295

Mary Matz

#170679
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Mary Matz was a Pennsylvania theologian who became the first woman ordained by the Moravian Church in North America. She also served as a vice president of the Moravian National Council of Churches.
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#296

Grace Jantzen

#41983
Overall Influence
1948 - 2006 (58 years)
Grace Marion Jantzen was a Canadian feminist philosopher and theologian. She was professor of religion, culture and gender at Manchester University from 1996 until her death from cancer at the age of 57.
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#297

Sister Susan Rose Francois

#118613
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Susan Rose Francois is a perpetually professed Roman Catholic sister of the order of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace. She is an author, columnist, and blogger on religious life and social justice. She has been active in the Nuns on the Bus movement, and came to the attention of mainstream media because of her daily practice of tweeting a prayer to US President Donald Trump.
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#298

Camille Fronk Olson

#85988
Overall Influence
Camille Fronk Olson is a retired professor and former chair of Brigham Young University's Department of Ancient Scripture in Religious Education and a scholar who has written multiple books on the role of women in the scriptures. She has also spoken widely in various forums on Latter-day Saint beliefs, especially as they relate to women.
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#299

Carmen Bernabé Ubieta

#178127
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Carmen Bernabé Ubieta is a theologian, specialising in biblical theology, including Joanic Studies, Early Christianity, and Women and Christianity. Since 1990, Bernabé is a lecturer in Theology at the Universidad de Deusto, in Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain.
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#300

Christian Howard

#178742
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Dame Rosemary Christian Howard , a British Christian theologian, was one of the five children of Geoffrey William Algernon Howard and his wife, Ethel Christian Howard. She was awarded the honorary degree of Lambeth Master of Arts by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
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