Phillips Brooks (December 13, 1835 – January 23, 1893) was an American Episcopal clergyman and author, long the Rector of Boston's Trinity Church and briefly Bishop of Massachusetts.

Phillips Brooks prepared for college at the Boston Latin School and graduated from Harvard University in 1855 at the age of 20, where he was elected to the A.D. Club.

In 1860, he was ordained priest, and in 1862, became rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Philadelphia, where he remained seven years, gaining an increasing name as a Broad churchman,[3] preacher, and patriot.

In addition to his moral stature, he was a man of great physical bearing as well, standing six feet four inches (1.93 m) tall.

During the American Civil War he upheld the cause of the North and opposed slavery, and his sermon on the death of Abraham Lincoln was an eloquent expression of the character of both men.

Under his inspiration, architect Henry Hobson Richardson, muralist John LaFarge, and stained glass artists William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones created an architectural masterpiece in Trinity Church, Boston.

Behind the free standing altar there was another revival from the early church chancel, a great synthronon for priests that surrounded the apse.

Brooks preferred to preach his legendary sermons from a modest lectern near the rector's stall on the south side of the chancel.

Such was the magnificence of Trinity Church that, in his chapter on Phillips Brooks' chancel in Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect's Four Quests, Douglass Shand-Tucci calls it "an American Hagia Sophia", a reflection of Brooks' architectural and liturgical tastes, disclosed in his travel writings, where in Germany for instance he referred to "thrilling music" and "thrilling incense" in respect to a liturgy he attended there in the Roman Catholic cathedral.

"[4] In 1877, Brooks published a course of lectures upon preaching that he had delivered at the theological school of Yale University, and which are an expression of his own experience.

Brooks was also famous and beloved for his collections of sermons, The Purpose and Use of Comfort, first published in 1878, which includes the title sermon as well as: "The Withheld Completions of Life," "The Conqueror from Edom," "Keeping the Faith," "The Soul's Refuge in God," "The Man with One Talent," "The Food of Man, "The Symbol and the Reality," "Is It I?

Brooks's understanding of individuals and of other religious traditions gained a following across a broad segment of society, as well as increased support for the Episcopal Church.

His contemporary biographer is Douglass Shand-Tucci, who published a chapter on the bishop in Ralph Adams Cram: an Architects Four Quests in 2005, and in 2009 on the website of Back Bay Historical/The Global Boston Perspective[6] and elaborated as "The Saint Bishop and the American Hagia Sophia" in an October 2009 lecture at the New England Historical Genealogical Society in Boston as part of "The Gods of Copley Square" series.

Another contemporary biographer, examining the preacher's evangelical legacy, is Gillis J. Harp,[7] who has written a major study, Brahmin Prophet : Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism.