Phillips Brooks (December 13, 1835 - January 23, 1893), was a United States clergyman and author.

He was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Through his father, William Gray Brooks, he was descended from the Rev. John Cotton; through his mother, Mary Ann Phillips, a woman of rare force of character and religious faith, he was a great-grandson of the founder of Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts. Four of the couple's six sons -- Phillips, Frederic, Arthur and John Cotton -- entered the ministry of the Episcopal Church.

Phillips Brooks prepared for college at the Boston Latin School and graduated from Harvard University in 1855. After a brief period as a teacher at Boston Latin, he began in 1856 to study for the ministry of the Episcopal Church in the Viriginia Theological Seminary at Alexandria, Virginia. In 1859 he graduated, was ordained deacon by Bishop William Meade of Virginia, and became rector of the Church of the Advent, Philadelphia. 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 preacher and patriot.

Endowed by inheritance with a rich religious character, evangelical traditions, ethical temper and strong intellect, he developed, by wide reading in ancient and modern literature, a personality and attitude of mind which appealed to the characteristic thought and life of the period. With Tennyson, Coleridge, Frederick D Maurice and FW Robertson he was in strong sympathy. 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. In 1869 he became rector of Trinity Church, Boston.

In 1877 the rebuilding of the church was finished, the architect being his friend Henry Hobson Richardson. Here Phillips Brooks preached Sunday after Sunday to great congregations, until he was consecrated Bishop of Massachusetts in 1891. In 1886 he declined an election as assistant bishop of Pennsylvania . He was for many years an overseer and preacher of Harvard University, his influence upon the religious life of the university being deep and wide. In 1881 he declined an invitation to be the sole preacher to the university and professor of Christian ethics. On April 30, 1891 he was elected sixth Bishop of Massachusetts, and on the 14th of October was consecrated to that office in Trinity Church. After a brief but great episcopate of fifteen months, he died, unmarried.

Phillips Brooks was six feet four inches tall. His sympathy with men of other ways and thought, and with the truth in other ecclesiastical systems gained for him the confidence and affection of men of varied habits of mind and religious traditions, and was thus a great factor in gaining increasing support for the Episcopal Church. His influence as a religious leader was unique. The degree of STD had been conferred upon him by the Harvard (1877) and Columbia (1887), and the Doctor of Divinity degree by the University of Oxford, England (1885). In 1877 he published a course of lectures upon preaching, which he had delivered at the theological school of Yale University, and which are an expression of his own experience. In 1879 appeared the Bohlen Lectures on The Influence of Jesus. In 1878 he published his first volume of sermons, and from time to time issued other volumes, including Sermons Preached in English Churches (1883).

In 1901, at New York, was published, in two volumes, Phillips Brooks, Life and Letters, by the Rev. A.V.G. Allen, professor of ecclesiastical history at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who in 1907 published at New York, in a single volume, Phillips Brooks, an abbreviation and revision of the earlier biography.