Without Pope John XXIII, there would have been no Second Vatican Council, no quick walk for the Catholic Church into the modern world.
Without Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso, Tibetan Buddhism would be a shadow of its present self, a disappearing tradition of interest mostly to academics.
So what about that other great 20th-century religious figure, Billy Graham? What would our world be like without him?
Graham burst onto the national scene after World War II to revive a tradition of urban mass revivalism that had petered out with the 1925 Scopes monkey trial. Although his background was fundamentalist, he became the Galahad of its kinder, gentler postwar incarnation, Neo-evangelicalism.
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