The Belgian Roman Catholic theologian Edward Schillebeeckx (born 1914) was one of the most influential Catholic thinkers of his day.

Edward Schillebeeckx was born November 12, 1914, in Antwerp, Belgium. The sixth of fourteen children of Johanna and Constant Schillebeeckx, he grew up in Flemish-speaking northern Belgium and attended a high school run by the Jesuits. His father was an accountant in the Public Records Office, and an older brother became a Jesuit missionary in India. But Edward found himself more attracted to the Dominicans, whom he joined when he was 19. He has said that the Dominicans seemed to him warmer, and that their stress on the doctrine of God in philosophy and on social questions in theology struck a responsive chord.

Schillebeeckx did his novitiate and philosophical studies in Ghent, Belgium, after which he performed his compulsory military service. The next stage in his formation was theological studies at the...