Who are your favorite religious thinkers?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Your actual favorites, not the ones you trot out to own people on uselectionatlas dot org slash FORUM.

I like to say that my favorite theologians are Vatican II figures like Balthasar and Rahner, interwar Jewish thinkers like Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem, and various Doctors of the Church and Anglo-Catholic luminaries, and I do like and admire all of those people, but judging by whose books I actually have on my shelves and whose ideas my mind goes to first when I discuss religion, the answer is probably C.S. Lewis and Simone Weil. They're figures of more or less the same generation who are both pretty peripheral within the world of formal academic theology but enjoy a wider popular readership than most theologians; I'm much more comfortable with Lewis than with Weil because Lewis wasn't a self-hating Jew; I've read a profusion of Lewis's books and essays quite recently but haven't actually sat down and read Weil's work in a couple of years (the last time was when I was writing a paper on the psychology of French and Polish Holocaust rescuers; Weil wasn't a Holocaust rescuer but her initial roll-over-and-die psychological reaction to the establishment of the Vichy regime was a relevant case study anyway).

Certain well-known Buddhist figures such as Thich Nhat Hanh also come to mind as people I esteem very highly as moral philosophers, but their non-moral beliefs are much further removed from my own.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Teresa of Avila and Thomas à Kempis are tried and true favorites.

For me as well. And one of my regrets about grad school is not having gotten to read more of the Cappadocians.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Thomas Aquinas, St.Augustine , C.S Lewis, Chesterton, Peter Kreft

Some great figures on this list! Kreeft's persona is too much of a culture warrior for me but I've met him and actually found him pretty cool in person.

, and Edward Feser.

ayy lmao

Also, I forgot to mention that my vote for the greatest theologian of all time goes to Kalonymus Kalman Shapira. The Esh Kodesh is not a systematic work and at points it's not even coherent, but the circumstances under which Shapira was writing (being the religious leader of the Warsaw Ghetto) mean that any success at doing theology at all automatically makes him one of the all-time greats. The fact that much of it is coherent and insightful puts him on top.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Does Stephen Woodford (RationalityRules) count?

I googled him and the very first thing to come up was a video titled "Ben Shapiro calmly EDUCATED by Stephen Woodford". Not my preferred style by a long shot, but I'm sure Shapiro had it coming.