It was on this date, August 29, 1862, that Belgian symbolist playwright, poet and Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck was born Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck in Ghent, Belgium, into a wealthy, French-speaking family. Education under Jesuit control and literary restrictions instilled in Maeterlinck a distaste for the Catholic Church and organized religion generally. “The decent […]

It was on this date, August 26, 1941, that American feminist, democratic socialist, and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich was born Barbara Alexander in Butte, Montana, the daughter of a copper miner and a liberal Democrat. An award-winning columnist and essayist, Ehrenreich has been called “a veteran muckraker” by The New Yorker magazine for such works […]

Shroud of Turin (1978) It was on this date, August 25, 1978, that the famous Shroud of Turin, still venerated as the burial cloth of the crucified Jesus, went on public display for the first time in 45 years. Since 1578 the shroud, or sindon, has been housed at Turin, where it is only displayed […]

Read about the King of Siam’s Eclipse, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, fantasy author H. P. Lovecraft, What is a saint?, science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, What is a church?, comedian Stephen Fry and more …

It was on this date, August 24, 1957, that English actor and comedian Stephen Fry was born in Hampstead, London and reared in no religion. After being expelled from two schools and spending three months in prison for credit card fraud, he entered Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he studied English Literature and became involved in […]

Read about the Great Agnostic Robert Ingersoll, Spanish dramatist Jacinto Benavente y Martínez, Cuban revolutionist Fidel Castro, American writer Russell Baker, French political theorist Pierre Sylvain Maréchal, American film director James Cameron, topless Femen activists fighting the patriarchy and more …

Femen founder Anna Hutsol says, “Feminists can’t be religious ... There is no such thing as Orthodox or Catholic feminists or, most absurdly of all, Islamic feminists. It’s ridiculous. They are antagonistic ideologies; mutually exclusive.”

It was on this date, August 15, 1750, that French writer and political theorist Pierre Sylvain Maréchal was born in Paris. Trained as a lawyer, he found employment at the Collège Mazarin as an aide-librarian. Maréchal was an admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Helvétius, and Diderot, and connected with deist and atheist authors like himself, […]

It was on this date, August 12, 1866, that Spanish dramatist Jacinto Benavente y Martínez was born in Madrid. One of the most important Spanish dramatists of the 20th century, Benavente wrote over 170 plays, including La comida de las fieras (The Food of the Beasts, 1898), an attack on aristocrats, La Gobernadora (The Governor, […]

Read about Percy Bysshe Shelley, Guy de Maupassant, Asia Carrera, James “The Amazing” Randi, Christian Communion, Sixtus IV, Churches v. Astronomy and more …