Category: Appreciation

World-renowned paleoanthropologist and conservationist Richard Leakey died in his home in Nairobi, Kenya, on January 2, 2022. He was an advocate for the advancement and acceptance of human evolution, especially as it related directly to Africa. Richard Erskine Frere Leakey was born on December 19, 1944, in Nairobi to Louis and Mary Leakey. He spent …

“Ant Man,” “Father of Sociobiology,” “Father of Biodiversity”: these epithets were how E. O. Wilson became affectionately known due to his lifelong work with insects and in environmental advocacy. He was also known for his secular humanist ideas pertaining to religion and ethics. Wilson died on December 26, 2021, in Burlington, Massachusetts, at the age …

Kurt Westergaard, the creator of the most provocative of the famous Danish Muhammad cartoons, has died of natural causes at age eighty-six. Born on July 13, 1935, in the village of Døstrup, Denmark, Westergaard grew up in a conservative Christian home but turned from these roots in high school when he was introduced to cultural …

Philosophy professor and ethics collaborator Richard Thompson Hull died on March 15, 2021, in Tallahassee, Florida, after several years of health problems. Born December 29, 1939, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Hull served in the U.S. Army after high school for six months and then served in the Army Reserve for six years before attending undergraduate …

Hector Avalos, a respected biblical scholar despite his open atheism, died after a battle with cancer on April 12, 2021. Born October 8, 1958, in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, Avalos completed his undergraduate studies at the University at Arizona. He was awarded a master of theological studies from Harvard Divinity School. In 1991, he received a …

Bruce Adams was many things to the Western New York community: artist, teacher, mentor, writer, adviser, husband, father, and friend. He was also involved in the humanist movement with the Center for Inquiry (CFI), copublisher of Free Inquiry. Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1952, Adams was the oldest of six children and attended school …

Poet, author, editor, and Charles Darwin expert Philip Appleman passed away on April 11, 2020, at the age of ninety-four. Born in Indiana on February 8, 1926, Appleman served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II and the Merchant Marine after the war. He received degrees from Northwestern University, the University of …

James Christopher, founder of Secular Organizations for Sobriety (SOS), died July 9, 2020. He had been hospitalized after a stroke in late June. He was seventy-seven. Christopher’s article “Sobriety without Superstition” appeared in the Summer 1985 issue of Free Inquiry. In that article, Christopher told his story of addiction and sobriety. He also lamented that …

Marvin Kohl, PhD, died on July 8, 2020, in an assisted living facility in Massachusetts after surviving COVID-19 in April. Kohl, for more than thirty years a philosopher in the SUNY system, was the author of The Morality of Killing and the editor of Beneficient Euthanasia and Infanticide and the Value of Life. He was …

On August 10, 2020, Ed Brayton wrote a post on his Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog titled “Saying Goodbye for the Last Time.” The post was to inform his readers that he had decided, as he put it, “to end my battle to the death with death.” Brayton had long battled with his health …

On August 10, 2020, Ed Brayton wrote a post on his Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog titled “Saying Goodbye for the Last Time.” The post was to inform his readers that he had decided, as he put it, “to end my battle to the death with death.” Brayton had long battled with his health …

At the close of each year, those close to Barbara Smoker looked forward to receiving what Freethinker magazine Editor Barry Duke affectionately referred to as Smoker’s “‘egotistical’ year-end newsletter.” In Smoker’s 2018 missive, her correspondents learned that in May the beloved UK atheist activist had been diagnosed with advanced breast cancer. In disclosing her diagnosis, …

Barbara Smoker (1923–2020), one of Britain’s most colorful and prolific voices for atheism and humanism, died in early April. She was the second-longest-serving president of the National Secular Society, an atheist organization; chair of an influential euthanasia society; a vice chair of Humanists UK, the country’s national humanist organization; and the author of a popular …

Mario Bunge passed away in the loving company of his wife, Marta, and children, Eric and Silvia, on February 24, 2020, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Bunge was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on September 21, 1919. He studied physics and mathematics as an undergraduate at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata and founded a Workers …

Edd Doerr was born on December 21, 1930, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of Eugene Henry and Mary Catherine (Burk) Doerr. He received his Bachelor of Science from Indiana University in 1956. A former teacher of history and Spanish, he is the author, coauthor, editor, or translator of twenty books, including My Life as a …

Adolf Grünbaum was born in Germany in 1923 and immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1938. From a young age, he had philosophical questions that led to theistic research and the declaration of his atheism just before his bar mitzvah. After learning English in the United States, he earned his undergraduate degree …

Deo Ssekitoleko has been credited with bringing humanism to Uganda, Kenya, and East Africa when he first brought young people from the University of Nairobi, Kenya, to the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) General Assembly in 2004, which was held in Kampala, Uganda. There students were not only exposed to the IHEU but to …

In 2014, I had a long phone conversation with Harlan Ellison, during which I took many notes. I had sent him a letter asking if he’d appear in (or at least consult on) a music video that my band, The Heathens, was considering shooting. Craig Else and I had written a song about L. Ron …

One cold spring day in 2005, I was alone in the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum, setting up the exhibits for the museum’s twelfth anniversary season. The fax machine (the museum’s only phone) rang. Mind you, nobody calls me when I’m off in the Finger Lakes region doing museum setup unless it’s an office emergency. …

Jens Christian Skou, born in 1918, may have spent his life in Denmark, but his legacy spread across the world and time. Skou discovered a vital mechanism in the body’s cells, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1997. Skou graduated from the University of Copenhagen in 1944 with a degree in medicine …

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018)

Brown was a passionate lecturer on women’s rights at conferences and other events throughout the world.

Wells is best known as an advocate of the thesis that Jesus is a mythical— not historical—figure

“His views often riled many of his fellow humanists.”