It was on this date, February 28, 1533, that French essayist Michel de Montaigne was born. As his famous Essays were published, the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Massacre was a fresh memory in France, so Montaigne professed to be a Catholic. Yet he made some risky statements in his most famous work: • Man is certainly […]

It was on this date, February 27, 1823, that French scholar Joseph Ernest Renan was born. Destined for the priesthood, and having taken minor orders, Renan gave up those studies after reading German philosophy. He remained a Pantheist throughout his life. But he angered the clergy and lost this position by publishing his Life of […]

It was on this date, February 27, 1807, that American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born. He is best known for his poems “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855), “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1858) and “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1860). Although Longfellow is typically described as a Christian, his fellow poet and friend William Dean Howells […]

It was on this date, February 26, 1802, that French Romantic novelist, poet and dramatist Victor-Marie Hugo was born in Besançon, the son of an officer in Napoleon’s army and a Mason. His parents, both atheists, divorced, and Hugo, who was never baptized, was reared by his mother. She took the family to Italy for […]

It was on this date, February 25, is the 7th anniversary of the US release of the 2004 Mel Gibson film, The Passion of the Christ. Although nominated but passed over at the Oscars, for its $30 million budget, the film made almost a quarter million dollars on over 950 screens its opening weekend. As […]

It was on this date, February 24, 1852, that Irish writer George Moore was born George Augustus Moore, to a Roman Catholic family of large land holdings in Moore Hall, near Lough Carra, County Mayo. First intent on becoming a painter, in the 1870s he traveled to Paris and absorbed not only French artistic ideas, […]

It was on this date, February 24, 1893, the Italian librettist and composer Arrigo Boito was born. Boito is primarily remembered as librettist for Giuseppe Verdi’s operas “Otello” (1887) and “Falstaff” (1893), and for his own 1868 opera, “Mefistofele.” It was through “Mefistofele,” based on Goethe’s “Faust,” that Boito infuriated the Italian clergy through his […]

It was on this date, February 23, 303 CE, that the second of only two general persecutions of Christians in the Roman Empire began under the Emperor Diocletian and lasted two years. In spite of the accounts in Sunday School parlayed as fact, and as noted elsewhere, even Catholic historians can document only about a […]

It was on this date, February 23, 1868, U.S. historian and black civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois, author of “The Souls of Black Folk,” was born. Du Bois also helped to create and guide the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). About his religious beliefs, Du Bois wrote, “In Germany I […]

It was on this date, February 22, 1788, that the “philosopher of pessimism,” Arthur Schopenhauer, was born into a wealthy family of Danzig, on the Baltic coast. Danzig is now Gdańsk, Poland, but in Schopenhauer’s day it was part of German-speaking Prussia. His business education was cut short by the death of his father, leaving […]