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Time magazine has named “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America,” leaving out Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson but naming author Tim LaHaye of the Left Behind series, GOP Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Michael Gerson, a White House speech writer. Catholic priest Richard Neuhaus, a convert from Lutheranism and founder of the New York–based religious journal First Things, was included. A less familiar name is Douglas Coe, 76, head of the Washington-based Fellowship Foundation, which convenes the National Prayer Breakfast following the State of the Union address. The Grahams, Billy and Franklin, were there as well as historian Mark Noll of Wheaton College and Purpose-Driven Life author Rick Warren. Diane Knippers, an Episcopal laywoman who heads the Washington-based Institute on Religion and Democracy, made the list as well.

Prominent antiapartheid activist Allan Boesak has been readmitted as a church minister after the recent clearing of his criminal record by South African President Thabo Mbeki. Boesak, a former president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, was ordained January 30 before a crowd of well-wishers at the Uniting Reformed Church—a branch of South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church—at Piketberg in the Western Cape. He had served two years in nearby Malmesbury prison after being found guilty of fraud and the theft of $65,000 in donor funds paid to his Foundation for Peace and Justice.