Date of Birth: 
About John Hinnells
- Professor John Russell Hinnells (27 August 1941 - 3 May 2018) was Professor of Comparative Religion at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London.
- At various times he held the posts of lecturer at Newcastle University, then Professor of Comparative Religion at Manchester University, and later at Derby, and Liverpool Hope, and was a fellow at Robinson College Cambridge. The course of his life work was set in 1970 when he edited Comparative Religion in Education , with a foreword by the then Secretary of State for Education Edward Short.
- The theme of this work being the importance of understanding other peoples views and religions from an open, rather than a Western, largely Christian, perspective.
- For the next four or more decades, he shaped his subject in several ways: He popularised the subject of Comparative Religion through books with a wide readership, including the first Penguin Dictionary of Religions , the Handbook of Living Religions, the Handbook of Ancient Religions, and the Who's Who of World Religions . He deepened the research base through books on research method that geographers and sociologists also use, most notably through The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion. He widened the thematic study of religion through books on religious diaspora, religion and violence, religion health and suffering, and religion wealth and giving. He was an authority on Zoroastrianism.
- His books on Zoroastrianism include Persian Mythology , Zoroastrians in Britain , The Zoroastrian Diaspora: religion and Migration .A festschrift was published in his honour in 2017.
- His work was memorialised in the Times and the Telegraph, and by a memorial lecture by Almut Hintze at SOAS.
- His book collection is now at the Ancient India and Iran Trust in Cambridge, and is being catalogued as the John Hinnells Collection, and made available through the Cambridge University Library.
Read more at Wikipedia