Born in Washington, D.C., Richard Crouter is the John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor of Religious Studies Emeritus at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. He grew up in Southern California where he studied history, philosophy, and religion at Occidental College. Having decided on a career in college teaching he set out to study the formation of Christian theology in Greco-Roman antiquity as well as the challenges facing Christianity in the modern period. Following graduate study at Union Theological Seminary in New York and the University of Heidelberg, he taught in the Department of Religion at Carleton College in Northfield Minnesota and came to specialize on the work of the Berlin pastor, theologian, and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), widely known as the "founder of modern Protestant theology." His interests range from Biblical studies to St. Augustine, Kierkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr and the relationship between religion, politics, and modern secularity. He has lectured widely in the U.S. as well as overseas, especially in Germany and the U.K.In the 1980s he published the first English translation of the 1799 edition of Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, a classic text within German romanticism that sees religion as akin to poetry, initiated by a sense of awe and wonder about the universe (Cambridge University Press, 1988, 1996). Together with Julie Klassen in Carleton's German Department, he translated texts regarding Jewish emancipation in Berlin in which Schleiermacher played a major part, A Debate on Jewish Emancipation and Christian Theology in Old Berlin (Hackett Publishing, 2004). For some fifteen years he co-edited the Journal for the History of Modern Theology (Walter de Gruyter). Recent titles include a collection of essays on pivotal aspects of Schleiermacher's illustrious career, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (Cambridge, 2005, paper 2007) and a primer on the "Niebuhr Revival" within U.S. political and religious culture, written for general readers, Reinhold Niebuhr: On Politics, Religion, and Christian Faith (Oxford, 2010).