Category: Obituary

William Franklin Graham Jr., best known to the world simply as Billy Graham, died at his home in Montreat, North Carolina, on February 21, 2018. He was ninety-nine. Graham was perhaps the world’s best known Christian evangelist. He supposedly provided spiritual counseling to every president from Harry Truman to Barack Obama. Graham was a longtime …

Remembering scholar and author Earl Lee.

Remembering an exceptional chemist, humanist, and educator.

Machan will be most remembered for his role in publishing the libertarian magazine Reason and the establishment of the Reason Foundation.

The Center for Inquiry extends its deepest condolences to the family of Lavanam.

Anne Nicol Gaylor, the principal founder of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), died at the age of eighty-eight in Wisconsin on June 14.

First Council for Secular Humanism Executive Director, 1925–2014

Gerald A. Larue, a senior editor of Free Inquiry and a Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism (a program of the Council for Secular Humanism), died September 17, 2014, at the age of ninety-eight.

Victor J. Stenger, a physicist and the author of many popular books on atheism and science, died on August 27, 2014, at the age of seventy-nine.

We honor Barbara Stanosz, Humanist Laureate and philosopher.

Edwin Kagin, American Atheists’ national legal director and cofounder of Camp Quest, has died at the age of seventy-three.

Joseph Raymond Levee, a dedicated supporter of the Council for Secular Humanism and its supporting organization, the Center for Inquiry, died at the age of eighty-seven on February 1, 2014.

Mainstream Texas educators and scientists have been ineffectual in persuading legislators, much less the Textbook Committee’s majority, to desist from “kidnapping” real history and science. Here, I add ridicule to try inducing objectivity.

Henry Morgentaler was born in Poland in 1923 and emigrated to Canada in 1950. All Morgentaler’s family members except for his brother had died in death camps. He became a physician and Canada’s best-known advocate for safe, legal abortion, and he detailed his activism in a feature article he wrote for Free Inquiry in the …

Paul Kurtz, founder and longtime chair of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism, and the Center for Inquiry, died on October 20, 2012, at the age of eighty-six. He was one of the most influential figures in the humanist and skeptical movements from the late 1960s through the first decade of …

  Sergei Kapitza, 1928 – 2012 In early 2012, Sergei Kapitza won the first gold medal awarded by the Russian Academy of Sciences for his “outstanding achievements in the dissemination of scientific knowledge.” This was appropriate, because Kapitza was one of the few people–one of the important few–who could be described as a “science popularizer.” …

Gore Vidal, a laureate of the International Academy of Humanism (a Council for Secular Humanism program), recently died at the age of eighty-six. Academy secretary Stephen Law said: “Gore Vidal has been an inspirational figure to a great many people, myself included. Of course, he will be remembered for being urbane, fiendishly talented, and terrifyingly …

One cannot discuss modern sociology without understanding the contributions of Irving Louis Horowitz. One of his best-known accomplishments is the system he created for measuring quality of life in societies by comparing a state’s aggressiveness toward its citizens in terms of rates of imprisonment and more-violent actions such as executions as opposed to the civil …

It is with profound sorrow that I wish to comment on the passing of Antony Flew, one of the leading British philosophers of our time, who died at the age of eighty-seven. For more than a half century, he was considered one of the most important atheist philosophers in the world, a position that he …

Basava Premanand, humanist, rationalist, and skeptic, died in September in Podanur, India, at the age of eighty. He was the founding president of the Federation of Rationalist, Humanist, and Atheist Associations of India and edited the monthly Indian Skeptic. Premanand dedicated his life to exposing fraudulent cult gurus, divine babas, and holy mathas in India …

H. J. Blackham—philosopher, writer, educationalist, lecturer, and doyen of the secular humanist movement—died peacefully on January 23, 2009, two months short of his 106th birthday. He is commonly known as the father of modern humanism. Although he left school at the end of the First World War to become a farm laborer, he never stopped …