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.
The lifelong AME Church member was at the center of the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education.
Page, 65, was known for bridging divides in the 15-million-member denomination.
Smith is one of the surviving workers whose strike brought Martin Luther King Jr. to Tennessee in 1968.
Church elders and an outside firm investigated and cleared Hybels. But recently several former employees went public with their accounts—and doubts about the investigations.
He was an air force captain who became a conscientious objector. Now he'll lead a historic peace church.