Robert McAfee Brown (1920-2001), an American Presbyterian, was a master theologian, a spiritual guide, and an engaged activist, whose long career reflected many of the critical movements and concerns of the twentieth century. As an official Protestant observer at Vatican II, he was an influential figure in the ecumenical movement. But his concerns ranged widely over the intersection between faith and the issues of his time: the Holocaust and Jewish-Christian relations; the Civil Rights movement and race relations; the emergence of Latin American liberation theology; the Vietnam War and the struggle for peace in Central America; and the changing shape of Protestant theology. Overall, his work represented a prophetic style of public theology, in which faith and practice, prayer and action, words and deeds, and religion and politics came full circle.