Observers, Detractors and Preachers of Religion Who Died in 2021

Imam Sohaib Nazeer Sultan

The interfaith leader was Princeton University’s Muslim chaplain and the author of the 2004 book “The Koran for Dummies.”

Sultan died on April 16 at age 40 after a diagnosis of a rare form of cancer.

Known for his faith-inspired compassionate view of life, he was a public lecturer and writer on Islam, Interfaith America noted. His interfaith work aimed to build bridges between Muslims and people of other faiths.

Prior to his Princeton role, Sultan was the first Muslim chaplain at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

In a YouTube conversation with Vineet Chander, Princeton’s Hindu chaplain, Sultan spoke about the role of rahmat, or mercy or grace, in accepting death: “Nobody wants to leave this world, there are too many attachments. … Whether you’re 40, or 80, or 120, you never want to leave, but at some point, you have to leave. This is the way that God has decreed the way the world to be.”

Richard Rubenstein

The radical Jewish thinker questioned the existence of God and wrote the seminal 1966 book “After Auschwitz.”

Rubenstein died May 16 at age 97.

Some of his theological views were shaped by the death of his infant son on the eve of Yom Kippur in 1950. He left his role as a Conservative rabbi and became a Florida State University professor, then president of the University of Bridgeport and ultimately one of the intellectual fathers of neoconservativism.

The leader of the “death of God” movement divided history before and after the creation of the Nazis’ largest death camp in World War II.

“Although Jewish history is replete with disaster, none has been so radical in its total import as the Holocaust,” he wrote in “After Auschwitz,” according to The Washington Post. “Our images of God, man, and the moral order have been permanently impaired. No Jewish theology will possess even a remote degree of relevance to contemporary Jewish life if it ignores the question of God and the death camps. That is the question for Jewish theology in our times.”

The Rev. Donald W. Shriver Jr.

The Presbyterian minister and Christian ethicist wrote widely to encourage white Americans to face and repent of their racist past.

Shriver died July 28 at 93.

The president of New York’s Union Theological Seminary from 1975 to 1991, he hired Black clergy and scholars such as Cornel West, James Forbes and James Melvin Washington as well as feminist theologians such as Phyllis Trible and Beverly Wildung Harrison.

His most celebrated 2005 book, “Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember its Misdeeds,” compared the work of public repentance in South Africa and Germany with that in the U.S.

American culture will never be truly reformed, Shriver wrote, “unless the past we ought to mourn is mourned, in fact, in public, and in the context of concrete gestures and measures that put the past behind us in our very act of confronting it.”

Bishop John Shelby Spong

The progressive theologian was the first to ordain an openly gay male priest in the Episcopal Church, in 1989.

Spong died on Sept. 12 at age 90.

He eventually ordained three dozen LGBTQ clergy in the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, New Jersey, and made sure any diocesan church seeking a new priest interview at least one woman candidate.

The author of more than a dozen books, including “Living in Sin: A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality,” he would draw hundreds of people during his book tours. He defended his rejection of miracles and denial of Christian doctrines such as the resurrection of Jesus and the virgin birth.

“We’re space-age people,” he told Religion News Service in 2013. “All I’m saying is that the world the Christian church was born in is not the world we live in, and if you confine it to the world it was born in, Christianity will die, because that world is dying.”