Robert D. Linder was the Distinguished Professor of History at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, and an acknowledged authority on modern religious history. He was the author or editor of fourteen books and more than one hundred articles in history and religion journals. He visited Australia each year since arriving on a Fulbright scholarship in 1987, and through the Evangelical History Association of Australia, of which he was a founder, and through many seminars and courses he taught in universities across Australia, making a major contribution to Australian religious history.