It was on this date, July 8, 1958, that American film and stage actor Kevin Bacon was born. Born Kevin Norwood Bacon and reared in in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at 17 he left for New York City to become an actor. After some struggle, he landed a noteworthy role in Diner (1982), then two years later […]

Read about compelling Genesis as history, actor Charles Laughton, the failure of Nostradamus, humorist Dave Barry, Italian liberator Giuseppe Garibaldi, the government-favored religion of the Salvation Army, burning Jan Hus for his opinions and more …

Read about Joss Whedon, religion and celibacy, Ricky Gervais, Pearl S. Buck, Lafcadio Hearn, the “Lemon Test” and Alton Lemon, forging the Papacy and more …

It was on this date, June 28, 1971, that the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the most significant ruling to date on the issue of church-state separation, limiting with the “Lemon Test” just how far the states and the United States can go in forcing religious support on citizens. In Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. […]

It was on this date, June 24, 1967, that Pope Paul VI promulgated the encyclical Sacerdotalis Cælibatus, The Celibacy of the Priest, reaffirming the that the “brilliant jewel” of priestly celibacy must remain a Roman Catholic command. To be celibate, as the term was originally understood, means to be unmarried, as distinguished from being chaste, […]

It was on this date, June 23, 1858, that 6-year-old Edgardo Mortara was kidnapped from his Jewish parents in Bologna, Italy, by agents of the Inquisition, under the Dominican Father (Pier Gaetano) Feletti. The parents, Momolo and Marianna Mortara, later learned that their Christian maid, Anna Morsi, had secretly baptized the boy when he was […]

It was on this date, June 22, 1633, that Florentine-Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (15 February 1564 to 8 January 1642) was compelled by the Roman Catholic Inquisition to recant the theory he held that the earth travels around the sun. What seems obvious to us today was unscriptural, and therefore by definition untrue, in Galileo's […]

Read about churches and animal cruelty, religious discrimination and the “Sherbert Test,” Alphonse Laveran, José Rizal, Salman Rushdie, Catholic “toleration” in Maryland, Jean-Paul Sartre, Galileo recanting before the Inquisition and more …

It was on this date, June 18, 1948, that the American Library Association adopted its “Library Bill of Rights,”* an affirmation that libraries are charged with providing the information and ideas necessary for an informed populace and a vibrant democracy. It has been amended twice since 1948 and its current version is still less than […]

It was on this date, June 17, 1963, that the U.S. Supreme Court decided 7-2 in Sherbert v. Verner (374 U.S. 398 (1963)), creating the “Sherbert Test,” and saying that adherents of minority faiths cannot be disadvantaged by government without a compelling interest in limiting free exercise of religion. When a textile mill worker was […]