Because they Believed 2

The Oberammergau Passion Play is the longest-established of its kind in the world. A typical summer season will consist of around 100 performances (4 each week, each of about 5hrs), with the major roles (including Jesus) shared by actors taking alternate turns. A 'typical Jesus', in the course of such a season, would spend 20 minutes on the cross each time (so 20mins x 50 = about 16 hours overall) in front of about 5,000 strangers in the audience. That alone is sobering food for thought, not far off 400 years on from the original vow.

Another truly remarkable and inspirational man.

Havers was the actor who played the role of one of the other athletes; Puttnam was the film director, and Abrahams was the (Jewish) fellow-athlete who also raised and represented issues of religious discrimination in the film. The actual athlete was Eric Liddell, who went on to be a Christian missionary in China and died there in World War 2 during the Japanese occupation. The film is also widely remembered for its stirring theme tune by Vangelis.

Parson Hawker was a colourful and thoroughly well-intentioned character, well worthy of your further research. Keble (Answer 1), Pusey (3) and Newman (4), meanwhile, were other and more conventionally eminent Victorian churchmen.

Another very fine individual whose life and spiritual convictions could be studied.

Runcie (Answer 1) was the then-Archbishop, and McCarthy (Answer 2) was a fellow-hostage. There is perhaps a slight coincidental irony in Waite's surname, given the extreme enforced patience required through his ordeal.

This is Leonard Cheshire as in the 'Cheshire Homes'; his wife was Sue Ryder.

Angelou recovered from an intimate personal assault while she was a young girl (after which she did not speak for five years), to become a powerful speaker and authoress on issues of spirituality, race / colour and social justice. She was positively associated with Martin Luther King and a close friend of Oprah Winfrey, and recited one of her poems at Bill Clinton's presidential inauguration; truly a great figure of her interesting times.

Brother Andrew (van der Bijl) has since done comparable work in other international arenas where Christianity is under threat.

As a quadriplegic, she has had a particular ministry to disabled believers and others, but by no means only to them. Her disability happens to be the result of her own momentary miscalculation as an exuberant teenager swimming at Chesapeake Bay; but she has thought through, lived with and transcended its results in a truly inspiring manner ever since.