Perry Schmidt-Leukel (born 1954) is Professor of Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology at the University of Muenster, Germany, and Director of the Institute for Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology. He is one of the Principal Investigators of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics”, University of Muenster. He holds degrees in Theology (Diploma) and Philosophy (Master). He received his PhD from the University of Munich (1992). His habilitatio (1996) was in Systematic Theology, Ecumenical Theology and Religious Studies.

Born in London on 27 November 1857, Charles Scott Sherrington attended Queen Elizabeth’s School in Ipswich and later Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. In 1876, he began studying medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital, passing his primary examinations of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1878. In 1880, he entered Gonville and Caius to study physiology under Sir Michael Foster, completing his B.A. in 1883. That year he was appointed demonstrator of anatomy at Cambridge and also worked at St Thomas’s Hospital, where he would qualify in medicine the following year.

Ninian Smart was born in Cambridge England in 1927. Smart attended the Glasgow Academy before joining the military in 1945 serving until 1948 in the British Army Intelligence Corps. Leaving the army as a Captain with a scholarship to Queen’s College University of Oxford he reverted to his Glasgow major Classics and Philosophy. However for his B.Phil. work, he returned to world religions, writing what he came to consider the first dissertation in Oxford on philosophy of religion after World War II.

Lars Olof Jonathon (known as Nathan) Söderblom was born on 15 January 1866, in Trönö, 200 kilometres north of Uppsala. His father was a Pietist pastor and his mother the descendent of an Oslo bishop. Söderblom attended the University of Uppsala, where he took his bachelor’s degree in 1866 with honours in Greek and adeptness in Hebrew, Arabic and Latin. Upon graduation he entered Uppsala’s School of Theology, where he studied theology and the history of religion and served as editor of the student missionary review, Meddelanden, from its founding in 1888.

William Ritchie Sorley was born on 4 November 1855 at Selkirk in Scotland, the son of Anna Ritchie and William Sorley, a Free Church of Scotland minister. He was schooled in Birkenhead and enrolled at the University of Edinburgh at the age of fifteen. After graduating, he continued at University for several years, studying theology at Edinburgh and also Berlin. His intention was to echo his father’s vocation, but this was not to be. Instead, at the age of twenty-four, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1882 he was awarded a first class in the moral science tripos.

David Stafford-Clark was born on 17 March 1916 in Kent. Following the completion of his medical studies at London University in 1939 he served as a member of the house staff at the university until the beginning of the Second World War during which he served in the RAF and published two volumes of war poetry. His time in charge of the station hospital at Bomber Command in Cambridgeshire proved influential to his later life as it enabled him to gain enough experience of psychiatry that he chose to specialise in the discipline at the close of the war. He married Dorothy Stewart in 1941.

George Steiner (1929–), literary critic, was born on 23rd April 1929 in Paris to Jewish Viennese parents. His family moved to the United States in 1940. He studied at the Universities of Paris, Chicago, Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge, and he was on the editorial staff at The Economist in London during the 1950s before being appointed a Fellow at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study in 1956, at age 27.

Medical doctor and philosopher James Hutchison Stirling was born on 22 June 1820 in Glasgow to William Stirling, a textile producer, and his wife Elizabeth Christie Stirling. William was known for his deeply religious views; those views never left the young James Stirling, the youngest of six, who grew up to be a vehement philosophical advocate of Natural Theology and proofs of the existence of God.

Jeffrey Stout is professor of religion at Princeton University. He is a member of the Department of Religion, and is associated with the departments of Philosophy and Politics, the Center for the Study of Religion, and the Center for Human Values. He joined the Princeton faculty in 1975, and plans to retire from active teaching in July 2018. He has received Princeton University’s Graduate Mentoring Award (2009) and Princeton’s Presidential Award for Distinguished Teaching (2010).