Spiritual Leaders Who Died in 2009

Oral Roberts

(1918-2009)

Born into poverty as the son of a traveling Pentecostal minister, Oral Roberts would become a pioneer televangelist who oversaw what was at one time a $500 million empire. The man who led nationally televised healing crusades found his calling as a teen, when he said he was healed of a life-threatening case of tuberculosis by a traveling evangelist.

Roberts recovered, preached his first sermon when he was 18, held his first healing service in 1940s, and founded the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association. In 1963, he founded Oral Roberts University. Even those who don't remember the days of his televised crusades will recognize the names of some who attended the university, such as Joel Osteen and Ted Haggard.

His success also prompted scrutiny. His healings generated skepticism, and he was widely criticized for a 1980s fundraising claim that God would "call me home" if Roberts failed to raise millions of dollars for his City of Faith Medical Center. Eventually, the center closed.

In 2007, his son Richard was forced to leave his post as head of the university after a scandal involving lavish spending. The university now has a new president and more than 3,000 students, and offers more than 75 undergraduate and graduate degrees. After Roberts's death from complications of pneumonia in December, his legacy will no doubt be debated. But his influence as a powerful Pentecostal leader and as a proponent of the idea that God wants to bless believers helped shape a generation of the faithful.

By Ansley Roan

Sri K. Pattabhi Jois

(1915-2009)

On May 18th Sri K. Pattabhi Jois took his maha samadhi--the final spiritual act of a true yogi--leaving his body at 93. The renowned Indian yoga teacher began studying with guru Tirumalai Krishnamacharya at age 12; he and fellow student B.K.S. Iyengar popularized two different streams of his lineage in America. If you've heard of Ashtanga'a vigorous, sweaty set of yoga poses designed to purify the mind and body, it's likely because of Jois. It's said that he prayed and practiced daily and taught yoga every day for 64 years. He believed dedication to yoga practice would help people "attain physical, mental, and spiritual happiness." As he liked to say, "Do your practice and all is coming." The day of his death, one of Jois's students, Dechen Thurman, told a class that his beloved guru never "got bored of yoga." He added that it was Jois's dedication to maintaining a personal practice that made people want to follow him. "You can all be a Pattabhi Jois," he said. Meaning, we can all dedicate ourselves to something so passionately and purposefully that we will affect the lives of millions.

By Valerie Reiss

Rev. Timothy Wright

(1947- 2009)

Rev. Timothy Wright, who would become known as the Godfather of Gospel, developed his love for gospel music at the age of 12 when he played piano for the choir at Washington Temple Church of God in Christ in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Wright went on to spend several years at the church as the music director before he was ordained by Rev. Frederick Washington in the late 1970s. He later founded Grace Tabernacle Christian Center Church of God in Christ in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Wright released 12 albums, some of which climbed the Billboard charts and received Grammy nominations, including, "Come Thou Almighty King" and "Been There Done That." But the culmination of his career was the song he recorded during a convocation at his church, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus." It was dubbed the "Katrina song" because it told the story of an old woman who, after losing everything, still had faith in God. It touched the hearts of those affected by Hurricane Katrina and also introduced a new generation of gospel fans to Wright's rousing baritone. In July, Wright and his family were in a devastating car accident that left him paralyzed from the chest down. His wife and grandson were killed. Although Wright vowed to return to the pulpit upon his recovery, he passed away before he could fulfill that promise. His music lives on through church choirs and other gospel artists, and his church lives on through his son, David Wright, who followed his father's footsteps from music to the pulpit.

By Nicole Symmonds

The Rev. Richard John Neuhaus

(1936-2009)

A Catholic intellectual who was named to Time Magazine's list of 25 Most Influential Evangelicals, Neuhaus was not easy to categorize. Once a liberal Lutheran pastor active in the antiwar and civil rights movements, he converted to Catholicism and is credited with helping to build the coalition of Catholics and evangelicals that helped propel President George W. Bush into office.

In the 1960s, he marched with Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma and joined forces with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel to speak out against the Vietnam War. Over time his politics became more conservative, in part because of his concern about the moral implications of abortion. His book, "The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America," argued against the idea that religion had no place in public life. In 1991, a year after his conversion to Catholicism, he became a Catholic priest. He founded First Things, a journal about religion and politics.

In 1994, he joined Charles Colson, an American evangelical leader, to write "Evangelicals and Catholics Together," which helped lay the groundwork for cooperation between the two groups. He advised President Bush on issues like abortion, gay marriage, and stem cell research which, in turn, helped earn him the slot in Time's 2005 list. Following Neuhaus's death from complications from cancer in January, the Rev. Jim Martin, associate editor of the Jesuit magazine America, called him "arguably the leading voice in conservative Catholic circles in this country."

By Ansley Roan

Millard Fuller

(1935-2009)

An entrepreneur from the age of 6, when he turned a profit by selling a gift pig, Millard Fuller had a knack for making money and became a millionaire before he was 30. But when his obsession with work threatened to destroy his marriage, Fuller and his wife, Linda, reexamined their lives and set about building a new one -- for themselves and, ultimately, hundreds of thousands of others.

The Fullers put their focus on God, and soon a new life's purpose emerged: providing shelter for the poor. The ministry they undertook first in Georgia and then in Africa led to the 1976 launch of Habitat for Humanity International, a worldwide Christian organization that relies not just on volunteers, but on the sweat equity of aspiring homeowners who otherwise couldn't afford their dreams. Millard Fuller became -- in the words of Christianity Today -- "God's contractor."

Fuller parted unhappily from Habitat for Humanity in 2005 and started a similar effort, the Fuller Center for Housing. He remains best-known, though, for his work with Habitat. Said Habitat's CEO, Jonathan Reckford: "Millard Fuller was a force of nature who turned a simple idea into an international organization that has helped more than 300,000 families move from deplorable housing into simple, decent homes they helped build and can afford to buy and live in."

By Mary Gladstone

Alfred Gottschalk

(1930-2009)

Both modernity and tradition defined Alfred Gottschalk, who led Reform Judaism's main institution of higher learning for three decades and ordained the world's first woman rabbi.

Having escaped Holocaust-era Germany at age 9, Gottschalk turned his experiences there -- including Kristallnacht and the loss of 55 family members -- into a passion for the Jewish faith and its people and institutions. He became a rabbi and a leading scholar in the Reform branch and served as the longtime president and then chancellor of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

In 1972 in Cincinnati, Gottschalk shook the Jewish world by ordaining a woman, Sally Priesand, as a rabbi. Twenty years later, he ordained Israel's first female rabbi. Starting in the late 1980s, he also broke new ground by welcoming gays and lesbians to rabbinical studies. Gottschalk was instrumental, as well, in the development of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which opened in 1993.

By Mary Gladstone

Rev. Ike

(1935-2009)

The Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, better known as Rev. Ike, preached a gospel of riches to an audience that at one time reached 2.5 million, including television and radio. He started his career as a Christian minister, becoming an assistant pastor at his father's church when he was just 14 and attending a Bible college, but he soon moved away from traditional Christian doctrine.

He preached that instead of waiting for a heavenly reward, believers could call on the divine power within and positive thinking to become wealthy now. It was a doctrine he called the Science of Living. "This is the do-it-yourself church," he said. "The only savior in this philosophy is God in you." He encouraged believers to imagine themselves swimming in money, and he requested cash donations from the faithful.

In the 1970s when African-Americans were not widely represented on television, he commanded an audience of millions; but he preferred not to be known as a black preacher, saying, "Call me a green preacher instead, because the only color of power in the American economy is green power. "

In recent years, his ministry declined after investigations into his finances. But his church still operates in Harlem, and the belief that individuals can create wealth for themselves through their thoughts continues to be a powerful and popular philosophy across the spiritual spectrum.

By Ansley Roan

John Daido Loori

(1931-2009)

Chemist. Photographer. Founder of a Zen monastery in New York's Catskills. John Daido Loori spent his life integrating art and science, East and West, the ancient and the modern.

Raised as a Roman Catholic, Loori turned to Buddhism as an adult, eventually starting the worldwide Mountains and Rivers Order as well as Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, N.Y. He is credited not only with helping to Americanize Buddhism, but with creating a Zen program for prison inmates, encouraging the use of art to teach the Dharma (Buddhist teachings and traditions), emphasizing environmental ethics (80 percent of Zen Mountain Monastery's 230 acres have been designated "forever wild") and embracing the internet and other innovations to broaden Zen's reach.

At the same time, Abbot Loori guarded the traditions and teachings against too much modernity. Said Richard Seager, the author of Buddhism in America, in a 2001 interview: "I think that while there's no question Daido Roshi is engaged in the Americanization of Buddhism, he's doing it in a cautious, very protective way." Indeed, Loori was said to have described himself as a "radical conservative."

By Mary Gladstone

The Rev. Forrest Church

(1948 -2009)

The Rev. Dr. F. Forrester Church, a gifted preacher and one of the bright lights of the liberal Unitarian Universalist movement, died at age 61 of complications from esophageal cancer. He had been minister to the historic All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City since the age of 29. Known as Forrest, Church was the son of Idaho Sen. Frank Church (D), a notable dove during the Vietnam era, and the grandson of a governor of Idaho. His father's gift to him of the Jefferson Bible (Thomas Jefferson's version of the New Testament featuring Jesus' moral teachings, with all the miracles cut out) made an indelible impression on his theology. Church preached a message of love, compassion, and social service. A prolific author, he wrote or edited 23 books and published several pieces on Beliefnet. His final book, "The Cathedral of the World," came out posthumously. In "Love and Death," written during his struggle with cancer, he summed up his life's philosophy: "The goal is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for....The one thing that can't be taken from us, even by death, is the love that we give away before we go."

By Wendy Schuman

Marie Knight

(1920-2009)

When Marie Knight first performed for a crowd, she was so young that her parents had to lift her onto a table during the church service so she could sing for the congregation. Listeners were struck not only by her vocal ability but also by the little girl's poise, a trait that continued to mark her style in the decades to come.

Knight went on to become half of a storied gospel-music duo in the late 1940s. She and singing partner Sister Rosetta Tharpe were so popular that some of their numbers, often done in call-and-response format, made it onto the rhythm-and-blues charts. "Up Above My Head" and "Didn't It Rain" were among their most acclaimed works.

Though success defined Knight's early professional life, personal tragedy struck as well. Both of her children died in a house fire while she was away on tour. Her marriage, which had followed a whirlwind, four-day courtship, also ended.

Knight and Tharpe both went their own ways musically by the mid-1950s. Knight expanded for a while into R&B, but in later years she enjoyed a comeback as a gospel artist. Critics hailed her final CD, 2007's "Let Us Get Together: A Tribute to Reverend Gary Davis." According to a review in the San Francisco Chronicle, "Her delivery is soulful enough to surely cause some nonbelievers to want to get right with God."

By Mary Gladstone

Photo Credit: MarieKnight.com

Marek Edelman

(1919-2009)

When the Nazis confined the Jews of Warsaw to a single neighborhood, isolating it from the rest of the city with barbed wire, walls, and checkpoints, starvation and disease were rampant; an estimated 500,000 Jews were crammed into the ghetto. That number began to drop, however, as the Nazis shipped daily trainloads of 5,000-6,000 Jews to death camps, luring them with promises of bread and insisting the trains were destined for factories with better living and working conditions. Watching these daily departures was a young man named Marek Edelman, who understood the passengers' true fates. As a courier for the ghetto hospital, Edelman had the right to pull a certain number of Jews off the trains for "health reasons," since the Nazis were maintaining the ruse that the trains were bound for factories and needed healthy workers.

With this power to save lives, Edelman scoured the trains not for the sick and feeble, but for the very opposite: Jews who could join an underground resistance of which he was a leader. Edelman died in 2009, the last surviving leader of what became known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the largest and most sustained armed Jewish resistance against the Nazis. Although most of the 220 Jewish fighters were killed in the uprising, Edelman managed to survive and became a noted cardiologist after the war. He remained in Poland for the remainder of his life, and in the 1970s and '80s became a sharp critic of the government and supporter of the Solidarity labor movement.

By Michael Kress

The Rt. Rev. John B. Coburn

(1914-2009)

During his long career, Rt. Rev. John B. Coburn served as a biology teacher, chaplain, church rector, and bishop of the Diocese of Massachusetts. But his many admirers saw in him a cleric and a leader who did more than "talk the talk" of religion.

In 1968, he left his position as dean of Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass. to spend a year in Harlem teaching high school dropouts. "I did it," he was quoted as saying, "to practice what I preach."

He'd already been something of a groundbreaker in Cambridge, guiding the seminary through a time when female students were first included. During Coburn's nine years as president of the denomination's national House of Deputies, Episcopalians saw another huge first--the ordination of women. Of the General Convention's 1976 vote formalizing ordination, Coburn told The Boston Globe, "To be in the House of Deputies when that vote was taken was a religious experience. When they walked back to their hotels, they were in a subdued mood, as if they had just left a service of Holy Communion."

By Mary Gladstone

Rabbi Levi Yitzhak Horowitz

(1921-2009)

Rabbi Levi Yitzhak Horowitz, the first American-born Hasidic Jewish rebbe, or spiritual leader, died in December, 2009. While most Hasidic sects carry the now-obscure names of the towns in Eastern Europe where they were founded--Lubavitch, Bobov, Belz, Satmar--Horowitz's group bears a name more familiar to the contemporary American ear: He was known as the Bostoner rebbe, leader of the Bostoner Hasidic sect founded by his father, Rabbi Pinchas Dovid Horowitz, after he settled in Boston in 1915. As a young rabbi in 1943, Levi Yitzhak Horowitz joined a group of rabbis who marched on Washington to demand that President Franklin D. Roosevelt take action to save the Jews of Europe from the Holocaust.

As the Bostoner Rebbe, Horowitz's priorities were rooted in two of Boston's main resources: outreach to the area's many Jewish students and support for Jewish families who traveled to Boston for medical treatment. The latter effort, through a group called Rofeh International ("Rofeh" is the Hebrew word for "doctor), which Horowitz founded and his sect continues to run, connects patients from around the world to medical specialists in Boston, and provides lodging and meals while they are there for treatment. Over the years, the sect has expanded, and Bostoner synagogues and communities can now be found in Israel and the New York/New Jersey area, in addition to Boston.

By Michael Kress