March 21, 1921 - September 8, 2014
Founding Owner of Chick-Fil-A Restaurants
From Atlanta, Georgia
Served in Atlanta, Georgia
Affiliation: Baptist
"If you wish to enrich days, plant flowers; If you wish to enrich years, plant trees; If you wish to enrich Eternity, plant ideals in the lives of others."
P.D. James
John Paul II
May 18, 1920 - April 2, 2005
Bishop of Rome
From Wadowice, Poland
Served in Vatican City, Italy
Affiliation: Catholic (Roman Rite)
"Only in Christ can men and women find answers to the ultimate questions that trouble them. Only in Christ can they fully understand their dignity as persons created and loved by God. Jesus Christ is "the only Son from the Father…full of grace and truth."
Ruth Graham
Billy Graham
November 7, 1918 – February 21, 2018
Evangelist
From North Carolina
Served around the world
Affiliation: Baptist
"During all my years as an evangelist, my message has always been the Gospel of Christ. It is not a Western religion, nor is it a message of one culture or political system. … It is a message of life and hope for all the world."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
December 11, 1918 - August 3, 2008
Writer and Historian
From Kislovodsk, Russian
Served in Germany and Russia
Affiliation: Russian Orthodox
"This is certainly true. Man has set for himself the goal of conquering the world but in the processes loses his soul. That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life. We have arrived at an intellectual chaos."
Bob Lindsey
August 16, 1917 - May 31, 1995
Pastor or Narkis Street Congregation and Co-founder of Jerusalem School of Synoptic Research
From Norman, Oklahoma
Served in Jerusalem, Israel
Affiliation: Protestant
"The significance of the Gospels and the variety of current opinion regarding them make it incumbent on both the ordinary reader and the dedicated scholar to acquire as much knowledge as possible if he or she wishes to form an accurate portrait of Jesus and, indeed, the very origins of the Christian movement."
Louis Zamperini
Walker Percy
Thomas Merton
January 31, 1915 - December 10, 1968
Trappist Monk and Writer
From Prades, France
Served in the Abbey of Gethsemani, Kentucky
Affiliation: Catholic (Franciscan)
"The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them."
Robert Pierce
Jacques Ellul
January 6, 1912 - May 19, 1994
Philosopher, Law Professor, and Sociologist
From Bordeaux, France
Served in Bordeaux, France
Affiliation: Christian
"The biblical teaching is clear. It always contests political power. It incites to 'counterpower,' to 'positive' criticism, to an irreducible dialogue (like that between king and prophet in Israel), to antistatism, to a decentralizing of the relation, to an extreme relativizing of everything political, to an anti-ideology, to a questioning of all that claims either power or dominion (in other words, of all things political), and finally, if we may use a modern term, to a kind of "anarchism" (so long as we do not relate the term to the anarchist teaching of the nineteenth century)."
Marshall McLuhan
July 21, 1911 - December 31, 1980
Philosopher in Communications Theory
From Alberta, Canada
Served in Canada and the US
Affiliation: Catholic
"In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message. It's the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same."
Mother Teresa
Simone Weil
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
February 4, 1906 - April 9, 1945
German Lutheran Pastor, Theologian and Anti-Nazi Dissident
From Wrocław, Poland
Served in Germany
Affiliation: Confessing Church
Death: Executed by hanging as the Nazi regime collapsed
"Man no longer lives in the beginning--he has lost the beginning. Now he finds he is in the middle, knowing neither the end nor the beginning, and yet knowing that he is in the middle, coming from the beginning and going towards the end."
Harold J. Ockenga
June 6, 1905 – February 8, 1985
Pastor, author, and founding president of both Fuller Seminary and Gordon–Conwell Theological Seminary
From Chicago, Illinois
Served in Boston and Pasadena
Affiliation: Congregational
There has evolved today a different emphasis … one that is able to say, ‘Christ is the answer. Christ is the answer to your sin problem. Christ is the answer in the biblical framework of reference because there is no other Christ. Christ is the answer when he and his teachings and biblical Christianity become translated into the framework of the social picture in which we live.”
Malcolm Muggeridge
Karl Rahner
Kyrillos VI
August 2, 1902 - March 9, 1971
Bishop of Alexandria
From Damanhour, Egypt
Served in Cairo, Egypt
Affiliation: Coptic Orthodox
"The path leading to Heaven is both wide and narrow. It is wide because it can accommodate the worst sinners of this world. However, it is narrow because if you desire to walk in it you cannot bear to carry even one sin."