The scholar of religion and culture will become president in September.
The Episcopal presiding bishop wove in references to Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Luther King Jr., and the composers of African American spirituals.
As general secretary of the Reformed Church in America, he led his denomination in standing against apartheid.
Borgdorff was also the first executive director of the Christian Reformed Church in North America.
The author of The Once and Future Church was part of the shift to looking at congregations in their contexts—not just the church in general.
Patricia A. Davenport and Viviane Thomas-Breitfeld will each lead a regional body in the predominantly white mainline Protestant denomination.
Tandean Rustandy, a business graduate of the University of Chicago, is funding scholarship at the Divinity School to broaden how Christianity is taught.
In portraying Christ’s blackness, he upended the assumptions of a field dominated by white theologians and helped spawn other theories of liberation.
Donna L. Barrett is stepping into a top leadership role in the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination.
“Probably the best description of him is a master manipulator,” Ricks said of David Koresh, who died in a fire in 1993 along with dozens of his Branch Davidian followers.