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 people in Religious Studies,
#51
Eugen Drewermann
#2454
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Eugen Drewermann is a German church critic, theologian, peace activist and former Catholic priest. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Drewermann was born in Bergkamen near Dortmund. He is best known in Germany for his work toward a non-violent form of Christianity, which, he believes, requires an integration of Depth psychology into Exegesis and Theology. Trained in philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, and comparative religious studies, he criticized the Roman Catholic Church's literal and biologistic interpretations of miracles, the virgin birth, Ascension, and Resurrection as superstitious and medieval.
Go to Profile#52
John B. Cobb
#1499
Overall Influence
1925 - Present (99 years)
John Boswell Cobb, Jr. is an American theologian, philosopher, and environmentalist. Cobb is often regarded as the preeminent scholar in the field of process philosophy and process theology, the school of thought associated with the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Cobb is the author of more than fifty books. In 2014, Cobb was elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#53
J. Gordon Melton
#1079
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
John Gordon Melton is an American religious scholar who was the founding director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion and is currently the Distinguished Professor of American Religious History with the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University in Waco, Texas where he resides. He is also an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church.
Go to Profile#54
Stanley Hauerwas
#2321
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Stanley Martin Hauerwas is an American theologian, ethicist, and public intellectual. Hauerwas originally taught at the University of Notre Dame before moving to Duke University. Hauerwas was a longtime professor at Duke University, serving as the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School with a joint appointment at the Duke University School of Law. In the fall of 2014, he also assumed a chair in theological ethics at the University of Aberdeen. Hauerwas is considered by many to be one of the world's most influential living theologians and was named "America's Best Theologian" by Time magazine in 2001.
Go to Profile#55
Rick Warren
#1979
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Richard Duane Warren is an American Baptist evangelical Christian pastor and author. He is the founder of Saddleback Church, an evangelical Baptist megachurch in Lake Forest, California. Early life and education Warren was born in San Jose, California, the son of Jimmy and Dot Warren. His father was a Baptist minister, his mother a high-school librarian. He was raised in Ukiah, California, and graduated from Ukiah High School in 1972, where he founded the first Christian club on the school's campus.
Go to Profile#56
John Polkinghorne
#1317
Overall Influence
1930 - 2021 (91 years)
John Charlton Polkinghorne was an English theoretical physicist, theologian, and Anglican priest. A prominent and leading voice explaining the relationship between science and religion, he was professor of mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge from 1968 to 1979, when he resigned his chair to study for the priesthood, becoming an ordained Anglican priest in 1982. He served as the president of Queens' College, Cambridge, from 1988 until 1996.
Go to Profile#57
David Bentley Hart
#2720
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
David Bentley Hart is an American writer, philosopher, religious studies scholar, critic, and theologian. Reviewers have commented on Hart's baroque prose and provocative rhetoric in over one thousand essays, reviews, and papers as well as nineteen books . From a predominantly Anglican family background, Hart became Eastern Orthodox when he was twenty-one. His academic works focus on Christian metaphysics, philosophy of mind, Indian and East Asian religion, Asian languages, classics, and literature as well as a New Testament translation. Books with wider audiences include The Doors of the Sea...
Go to Profile#58
John Walvoord
#5297
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
John Flipse Walvoord was a Christian theologian, a pastor, and the president of Dallas Theological Seminary from 1952 to 1986. He was the author of over 30 books, focusing primarily on eschatology and theology, including The Rapture Question, and was co-editor of The Bible Knowledge Commentary with Roy B. Zuck. He earned AB and DD degrees from Wheaton College, an AM degree from Texas Christian University in philosophy, a Th.B., Th.M., and Th.D. in Systematic Theology from Dallas Theological Seminary, and a Litt.D. from Liberty Baptist Seminary.
Go to Profile#59
Christopher Partridge
#3853
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Christopher Hugh Partridge is an author, editor, professor at Lancaster University, and founding Co-director of the Centre for the Study of Religion and Popular Culture. According to Gordon Lynch, Partridge is a leading scholar of topics in popular culture.
Go to Profile#60
Géza Vermes
#6969
Overall Influence
1924 - 2013 (89 years)
Géza Vermes, was a British academic, Biblical scholar, and Judaist of Jewish–Hungarian descent—one who also served as a Roman Catholic priest in his youth—and scholar specialized in the field of the history of religion, particularly ancient Judaism and early Christianity. He is best known for his complete translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls into English; his research focused on the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Ancient Hebrew writings in Aramaic such as the Targumim, and on the life and religion of Jesus. Vermes was one of the most important voices in contemporary Jesus research, and he has been described as the greatest Jesus scholar of his time.
Go to Profile#61
Eberhard Bethge
#3464
Overall Influence
1909 - 2000 (91 years)
Eberhard Bethge was a German theologian and pastor, best known for being the close friend and biographer of the theologian and anti-Nazi Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Early life Bethge was born in Warchau, Landkreis Jerichow II, Province of Saxony, the Kingdom of Prussia, near Magdeburg, on August 29, 1909. He attended several universities, as is customary for theology students in Germany, before attending the underground Finkenwalde Seminary in Pomerania where Bonhoeffer taught in the name of Germany's Confessing Church . Bethge became Bonhoeffer's close friend and confidant. With the help of pietist...
Go to Profile#62
Don Cupitt
#2880
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Don Cupitt is an English philosopher of religion and scholar of Christian theology. He has been an Anglican priest and a lecturer in the University of Cambridge, though is better known as a popular writer, broadcaster and commentator. He has been described as a "radical theologian", noted for his ideas about "non-realist" philosophy of religion.
Go to Profile#63
John Stott
#4091
Overall Influence
1921 - 2011 (90 years)
John Robert Walmsley Stott was an English Anglican priest and theologian who was noted as a leader of the worldwide evangelical movement. He was one of the principal authors of the Lausanne Covenant in 1974. In 2005, Time magazine ranked Stott among the 100 most influential people in the world.
Go to Profile#64
Thupten Jinpa
#3267
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Thupten Jinpa Langri is a Tibetan Buddhist scholar, former monk and an academic of religious studies and both Eastern and Western philosophy. He has been the principal English translator to the Dalai Lama since 1985. He has translated and edited more than ten books by the Dalai Lama including The World of Tibetan Buddhism , A Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus , and the New York Times bestseller Ethics for the New Millennium .
Go to Profile#65
James R. Lewis
#1582
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
James R. Lewis was an American philosophy professor at Wuhan University. Lewis was an academic, scholar of religious studies, sociologist of religion, and writer, specializing in the academic study of new religious movements, astrology, and New Age.
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Oscar Cullmann
#7294
Overall Influence
1902 - 1999 (97 years)
Oscar Cullmann was a French Lutheran theologian. He is best known for his work in the ecumenical movement and was partly responsible for the establishment of dialogue between the Lutheran and Roman Catholic traditions. Because of his intense ecumenical work, Cullmann's Basel colleague Karl Barth joked with him that his tombstone would bear the inscription "advisor to three popes."
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Franz König
#4224
Overall Influence
1905 - 2004 (99 years)
Franz König was an Austrian Cardinal of the Catholic Church. He served as archbishop of Vienna from 1956 to 1985, and was elevated to the cardinalate in 1958. The last surviving cardinal elevated by Pope John XXIII, he was the second-oldest and longest-serving cardinal worldwide at the time of his death.
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Gregory Schopen
#7838
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Gregory Schopen is Professor of Buddhist Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. He received his B.A. majoring in American literature from Black Hills State College, M.A. in history of religions from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and Ph.D. in South Asian and Buddhist studies from the Australian National University in Canberra. His Ph.D thesis is titled "Bhaisajyaguru-sutra and the Buddhism of Gilgit."
Go to Profile#69
Gerd Theissen
#6946
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Gerd Theißen is a German Protestant theologian and New Testament scholar. He is Professor of New Testament Theology at the University of Heidelberg. Early life and education Theissen obtained his doctorate in theology in Protestant theology from the University of Bonn in 1968. He then took a position studying Evangelical Theology at the University of Bonn. He obtained his habilitation in 1972 in Bonn, with a form-critical work on early Christian miracle stories.
Go to Profile#70
Yusuf al-Qaradawi
#525
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Yusuf al-Qaradawi was an Egyptian Islamic scholar based in Doha, Qatar, and chairman of the International Union of Muslim Scholars. His influences included Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn Qayyim, Sayyid Rashid Rida, Hassan al-Banna, Abul Hasan Ali Hasani Nadwi, Abul A'la Maududi and Naeem Siddiqui. He was best known for his programme الشريعة والحياة, al-Sharīʿa wa al-Ḥayāh , broadcast on Al Jazeera, which had an estimated audience of 40–60 million worldwide. He was also known for IslamOnline, a website he helped to found in 1997 and for which he served as chief religious scholar.
Go to Profile#71
Richard L. Rubenstein
#4537
Overall Influence
1924 - 2021 (97 years)
Richard Lowell Rubenstein was a theologian, educator, and writer, noted particularly for his path-breaking contributions to post-Holocaust theology and his socio-political analyses of surplus populations and bureaucracy. A Connecticut resident, he was married to art historian Betty Rogers Rubenstein .
Go to Profile#72
Ernst Käsemann
#9931
Overall Influence
1906 - 1998 (92 years)
Ernst Käsemann was a German Lutheran theologian and professor of New Testament in Mainz , Göttingen and Tübingen . Study and work Käsemann was born in Bochum. He obtained his PhD in New Testament at the University of Marburg in 1931, having written a dissertation on Pauline ecclesiology, with Rudolf Bultmann as his doctoral supervisor. Käsemann was one of Bultmann's more well-known politically left-of-centre pupils.
Go to Profile#73
Bhikkhu Analayo
#8606
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Bhikkhu Anālayo is a bhikkhu , scholar, and meditation teacher. He was born in Germany in 1962, and went forth in 1995 in the Theravāda monastic tradition Sri Lanka. He is best known for his comparative studies of Early Buddhist Texts as preserved by the various early Buddhist traditions.
Go to Profile#74
D. A. Carson
#7716
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Donald Arthur Carson is an evangelical biblical scholar. He is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and president and co-founder of the Gospel Coalition. He has written or edited about sixty books and served as president of the Evangelical Theological Society in 2022.
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Bruce M. Metzger
#7439
Overall Influence
1914 - 2007 (93 years)
Bruce Manning Metzger was an American biblical scholar, Bible translator and textual critic who was a longtime professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and Bible editor who served on the board of the American Bible Society and United Bible Societies. He was a scholar of Greek, New Testament, and New Testament textual criticism, and wrote prolifically on these subjects. Metzger was an influential New Testament scholar of the 20th century. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1986.
Go to Profile#76
Raymond Leo Burke
#3678
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Raymond Leo Burke is an American prelate of the Catholic Church. He is a bishop and a cardinal, and was a patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta from 2014 to 2023. He led the Archdiocese of St. Louis from 2004 to 2008 and the Diocese of La Crosse from 1995 to 2004. From 2008 to 2014, he was the prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura.
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Ninian Smart
#3154
Overall Influence
1927 - 2001 (74 years)
Roderick Ninian Smart was a Scottish writer and university educator. He was a pioneer in the field of secular religious studies. He is best known for his seven-dimensional definition of religion. In 1967 he established the first department of religious studies in the United Kingdom at the new University of Lancaster where he was also Pro-Vice-Chancellor, having already chaired one of the largest and most prestigious departments of theology in Britain at the University of Birmingham. In 1976, he became the first J.F. Rowny Professor in the Comparative Study of Religions at University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Tim LaHaye
#3115
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Timothy Francis LaHaye was an American Baptist evangelical Christian minister who wrote more than 85 books, both fiction and non-fiction, including the Left Behind series of apocalyptic fiction, which he co-authored with Jerry B. Jenkins.
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John Gerstner
#9922
Overall Influence
1914 - 1996 (82 years)
John Henry Gerstner was an American Reformed and Presbyterian theologian and professor of Church History at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and Knox Theological Seminary. He was an expert on the life and theology of Jonathan Edwards.
Go to Profile#80
Angelo Amato
#4041
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Angelo Amato, S.D.B. is an Italian cardinal of the Catholic Church who served as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints between 2008 and 2018. He served as Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 2002 to 2008 and became a cardinal in 2010.
Go to Profile#81
Vern Poythress
#5855
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Vern Sheridan Poythress is an American philosopher, theologian, New Testament scholar and mathematician, who is currently the New Testament chair of the ESV Oversight Committee. He is also the Distinguished Professor of New Testament, Biblical Interpretation, and Systematic Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary and editor of Westminster Theological Journal.
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Dumitru Stăniloae
#7402
Overall Influence
1903 - 1993 (90 years)
Dumitru Stăniloae was a Romanian Orthodox Christian priest, theologian and professor. He worked for over 45 years on a comprehensive Romanian translation of the Greek Philokalia, a collection of writings on prayer by the Church Fathers, together with the hieromonk, Arsenie Boca, who brought manuscripts from Mount Athos. His book, The Dogmatic Orthodox Theology , made him one of the best-known Christian theologians of the second half of the 20th century. He also produced commentaries on earlier Christian thinkers, such as St Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Maximus the Confessor, and St Athanasius of Alexandria.
Go to Profile#83
Reginald Ray
#11958
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Reginald Ray is an American Buddhist academic and teacher. Ray studied Tibetan Buddhism, traditional shamanic wisdom, and yogic-contemplative practices with the Tibetan refugee and recognized Vajrayana traditional-wisdom holder Chögyam Trungpa; and later studied under the tutelage of traditional Dagara teacher from Burkina Faso, Malidoma Somé.
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Thomas Jay Oord
#4268
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Thomas Jay Oord is a theologian, philosopher, and multidisciplinary scholar who directs a doctoral program at Northwind Theological Seminary and the Center for Open and Relational Theology. He formerly taught for sixteen years as a tenured professor at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho and before that a philosophy professor at Eastern Nazarene College. Oord is the author or editor of more than thirty books and hundreds of articles. He is known for his contributions to research on love, open theism, process theism, open and relational theology, postmodernism, the relationship betwe...
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Kurt Rudolph
#6733
Overall Influence
1929 - 2020 (91 years)
Kurt Rudolph was a German researcher of Gnosticism and Mandaeism. Education Born in Dresden, Rudolph studied Protestant theology, religion, history and Semitology at the universities of Greifswald and Leipzig in the years 1948 to 1953. Subsequently, for six years, he was research assistant while he worked in parallel towards doctorates in theology and religious history. In 1961, he received his habilitation in religious history and comparative religion.
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Thomas J. J. Altizer
#9719
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Thomas Jonathan Jackson Altizer was an American university professor, religious scholar, and theologian, noted for his incorporation of Death of God theology and Hegelian dialectical philosophy into his body of work. He regarded his philosophical theology as also being grounded in the works of William Blake and considered his theology to have come into its own with his extended study of Blake's radical visionary thinking: The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake ; indeed he regarded himself as the first and only fully Blakean theologian.
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Fethullah Gülen
#407
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Muhammed Fethullah Gülen is a Turkish Muslim scholar, preacher, and a one-time opinion leader, as de facto leader of the Gülen movement. Gülen is designated an influential neo-Ottomanist, Anatolian panethnicistist, Islamic poet, writer, social critic, and activist–dissident developing a Nursian theological perspective that embraces democratic modernity. Gülen was a local state imam from 1959 to 1981, and he was a citizen of Turkey until his denaturalization by the Turkish government in 2017. Over the years, Gülen became a centrist political figure in Turkey prior to his being there as a fugitive.
Go to Profile#88
Harvey Cox
#4219
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Harvey Gallagher Cox Jr. is an American theologian who served as the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, until his retirement in October 2009. Cox's research and teaching focus on theological developments in world Christianity, including liberation theology and the role of Christianity in Latin America.
Go to Profile#89
J. P. Moreland
#5428
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
James Porter Moreland , better known as J. P. Moreland, is an American philosopher, theologian, and Christian apologist. He currently serves as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada, California.
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Kenneth E. Hagin
#12070
Overall Influence
1917 - 2003 (86 years)
Kenneth Erwin Hagin was an American preacher. He is known for pioneering the Word of Faith movement. Biography Personal life Kenneth E. Hagin was born August 20, 1917, in McKinney, Texas, the son of Lillie Viola Drake Hagin and Jess Hagin. According to Hagin's testimony, he was born with a deformed heart and what was believed to be an incurable blood disease. He was not expected to live and at age 15 he became paralyzed and bedridden. In April 1933 he converted to Christianity. During a dramatic conversion experience, he reported dying, due to the deformed heart, three times in 10 minutes, each time seeing the horrors of hell and then returning to life.
Go to Profile#91
Gabriel Vahanian
#12132
Overall Influence
1927 - 2012 (85 years)
Gabriel Vahanian was a French Protestant Christian theologian who was most remembered for his pioneering work in the theology of the "death of God" movement within academic circles in the 1960s, and who taught for 26 years in the U.S. before finishing a prestigious career in Strasbourg, France.
Go to Profile#92
Craig Blomberg
#8728
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Craig L. Blomberg is an American New Testament scholar. He is currently the Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the New Testament at Denver Seminary in Colorado where he has been since 1986. His area of academic expertise is the New Testament. This includes parables, miracles, historical Jesus, Luke-Acts, John, 1 Corinthians, James, the historical trustworthiness of Scripture, financial stewardship, gender roles, Latter Day Saint movement, hermeneutics, New Testament theology, and exegetical method. Blomberg has written and edited multiple books.
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Clark Pinnock
#9549
Overall Influence
1937 - 2010 (73 years)
Clark H. Pinnock was a Christian theologian, apologist and author. He was Professor Emeritus of Systematic Theology at McMaster Divinity College. Education and career Pinnock was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on February 3, 1937. He grew up in a liberal Baptist congregation. Pinnock once recounted that as a child he had little interest in the church. Even though he was brought up in Liberal Christianity, he later became part of the broad Evangelical tradition, and explored Reformed, Arminian and Pentecostal streams of thought.
Go to Profile#94
Walter Brueggemann
#10704
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Walter Brueggemann is an American Protestant Old Testament scholar and theologian who is widely considered one of the most influential Old Testament scholars of the last several decades. His work often focuses on the Hebrew prophetic tradition and sociopolitical imagination of the Church. He argues that the Church must provide a counter-narrative to the dominant forces of consumerism, militarism, and nationalism.
Go to Profile#95
Louis Bouyer
#6625
Overall Influence
1913 - 2004 (91 years)
Louis Bouyer, CO , was a French Catholic priest and former Lutheran minister who was received into the Catholic Church in 1939. During his religious career he was an influential theological thinker, especially in the fields of history, liturgy and spirituality, and as peritus helped shape the vision of the Second Vatican Council. Along with Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and others, he was a co-founder of the international review Communio. He was chosen by the pope to be part of a team to initiate the International Theological Commission in 1969.
Go to Profile#96
Keith Ward
#3896
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Keith Ward is an English philosopher and theologian. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a priest of the Church of England. He was a canon of Christ Church, Oxford, until 2003. Comparative theology and the relationship between science and religion are two of his main topics of interest.
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Jon Sobrino
#7357
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Jon Sobrino is a Jesuit Catholic priest and theologian, known mostly for his contributions to Latin American liberation theology. He received worldwide attention in 2007 when the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a notification for what they termed doctrines that are "erroneous or dangerous and may cause harm to the faithful."
Go to Profile#98
David Gordon White
#5527
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
David Gordon White is an American Indologist and author on the history of yoga and tantra. He won the CHOICE book selection in religion, and an honorable mention in the PROSE book awards, both for Sinister Yogis.
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George Carey
#3420
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
George Leonard Carey, Baron Carey of Clifton is a retired Anglican bishop who was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002, having previously been the Bishop of Bath and Wells. During his time as archbishop the Church of England ordained its first women priests and the debate over attitudes to homosexuality became more prominent, especially at the 1998 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops.
Go to Profile#100
Henri Nouwen
#4070
Overall Influence
1932 - 1996 (64 years)
Henri Jozef Machiel Nouwen was a Dutch Catholic priest, professor, writer and theologian. His interests were rooted primarily in psychology, pastoral ministry, spirituality, social justice and community. Over the course of his life, Nouwen was heavily influenced by the work of Anton Boisen, Thomas Merton, Rembrandt, Vincent van Gogh, and Jean Vanier.
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