Vocation : Writers : Religion/ Philosophy

Isaac Kelley Beckes (September 19, 1909 – July 13, 1988) was the president of Vincennes University from 1950 to 1980. Before going to Vincennes he was the executive secretary of the United Christian Youth Movement. He is considered one of the initial leaders of a nationwide educational movement to add occupational programs alongside college transfer programs at two-year post-secondary institutions. He was also the first president of a two-year college to gain an exemption from the North American Interfraternity Conference and have national fraternities established at his school.

William Joseph Whalen (January 1, 1926 – March 25, 2008) was a nationally known US non-fiction writer and an expert on comparative religion.

Günter Weitling (born 1935) is a Lutheran theologian, historian, and author.
Weitling was born in Haderslev, Haderslev County, Denmark. After graduating from Haderslev Katedralskole in 1955, he studied Theology and Eastern Studies at the Universities of Bethel/Bielefeld, Mainz, Kiel, and Copenhagen. This was followed by a study of pedagogy in Breklum and stay at the Seminary in Preetz. He then served as a Lutheran pastor from 1962 to 1963 in Jörl (a district of Schleswig-Flensburg), from 1963 to 1965 in Sønderborg, and from 1965 to 1970 at the Højdevangskirke in Copenhagen. At the same time, he completed a clerkship at the gymnasium of Tårnby in religion, history and archaeology. In 1970 he received his doctorate from the University of Kiel. From 1970 to 1987, he worked as inspector at the Danish gymnasium in Sønderborg. 1987 until his retirement in 2000 he served as pastor of the Danish Church of Denmark. At the same time, he worked as a lecturer at the "Institute for the History of the Church and Ecclesiastical Archaeology" at the University of Kiel. Weitling founded the Deutsches Museum in Northern Schleswig and from 1986 to 2003 served as its Scientific Director.
Since 1971, Günther Weitling has written and edited a large number of books and treatises, dealing mainly with the history of the Church and the history of the German minority in Northern Schleswig. In 2000 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (German: Bundesverdienstkreuz) 1st Class, Germany's highest civilian honor.

Gerald Irvin Williamson (May 19, 1925 – April 12, 2023) was an American Reformed theologian, pastor, and author.

Elisabeth Elliot (née Howard; December 21, 1926 – June 15, 2015) was a Christian missionary, author, and speaker. Her first husband, Jim Elliot, was killed in 1956 while attempting to make missionary contact with the Auca people (now known as Huaorani; also rendered as Waorani or Waodani) of eastern Ecuador. She later spent two years as a missionary to the tribe members who killed her husband. Returning to the United States after many years in South America, she became widely known as the author of over twenty books and as a speaker. Elliot toured the country, sharing her knowledge and experience, well into her seventies.

Van A. Harvey was George Edwin Burnell Professor of Religious Studies (Emeritus) at Stanford University. Born in Hankow, China, he served in the U.S. Navy (1943–46), and was awarded a BA in Philosophy from Occidental College (1948, Phi Beta Kappa). After attending Princeton Theological Seminary for one year, he received a B.D. from Yale Divinity School in 1951 and a PhD. from Yale University in 1957 in post-Enlightenment religious thought. His thesis was entitled "Myth, Faith, and History" and his thesis supervisor was H. Richard Niebuhr.Van Harvey taught at Princeton University (1954–58), Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University (1958–68), the University of Pennsylvania (1968–78), and Stanford University (1978–1996). He was Chair of the graduate program in religion at SMU and Chair of his departments at both the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford.The aim of his first book A Handbook of Theological Terms (1964) was to explain to laypersons the meaning of technical terms found in Christian theology, with special attention to issues dividing Protestant and Catholic theology. His second book The Historian and the Believer (1966) was concerned with the way in which "morality of knowledge" that informs professional historical inquiry poses problems for the believer and theologian who attempt to justify the historical claims of Christianity “on faith”, especially when historical inquiry is concerned with Jesus of Nazareth. Harvey argues that these problems have not been satisfactorily dealt with by modern Christian theologians. He pays particular attention to the theologies of Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann states in a citation of this book that "I have long been more indebted to this than is evident from the number of explicit references" The third edition of 1996 contains a new introduction outlining his mature position on these issues.
One commentator has characterized Harvey's career after 1980 as having been transformed from theologian into skeptical student of religion. This change is reflected in both his articles and preeminently in his third book Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion (1995), winner of the 1996 American Academy of Religion’s award for excellence in constructive-reflective studies. This book argues that the neglected later writings of Ludwig Feuerbach dropped much of the Hegelian elements informing his better-known early work and created a more powerful theory for the origins and persistence of religion. Harvey compares this theory with several well-known contemporary social-scientific and psychological theories and judges Feuerbach's to be superior.
Harvey was awarded an honorary degree in the Humanities from Occidental College, two John Simon Guggenheim Fellowships (1966 and 1972), a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship (1979), a Visiting Fellowship from Clare Hall, Cambridge University (1979), and distinguished teaching awards from both the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University. He contributed to several encyclopedias and reference works including the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Harvey died July 11, 2021.

Elias Nason (21 April 1811 in Wrentham, Massachusetts – 17 June 1887 in North Billerica, Massachusetts) was a Massachusetts Congregational clergyman, educator, editor and author.