August 23
Anatole France (Quote)
“The impotence of God is infinite.”
— Anatole France (French writer, 1844-1924), "Under the Rose" (1925)
Compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
Andrew Rannells
On this date in 1978, actor Andrew Scott Rannells was born in Omaha, Neb., to Charlotte and Ronald Rannells, the fourth of five siblings. He attended Catholic schools, including Creighton Prep, an all-boys Jesuit high school. He served as an altar boy and revealed later he was targeted sexually by a Creighton priest, causing him to renounce Catholicism.
He took acting classes as a child and after high school moved to New York City to study theater at Marymount Manhattan College for two years before starting to work professionally, mostly in voice roles. Among his first live roles was the character James in the touring production of “Pokémon Live!” in 2000-01. The character was a hurtful description of a gay person, which by then Rannells knew he was.
After more roles in regional productions, he had his Broadway debut in 2005 as Link Larkin in “Hairspray.” In 2011 he originated the role of Elder Price in “The Book of Mormon, a musical written by “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone and “Avenue Q” composer Robert Lopez. Rannells was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical and won a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album for his performance in the show’s original Broadway cast recording.
He played a stripper in the film “Bachelorette” (2012), a lead character in the 2012–13 TV series “The New Normal” and the recurring role of Elijah on the HBO series “Girls.” Rannells played Whizzer Brown in the 2016-17 Broadway revival of “Falsettos,” directed by James Lapine, and Larry in the 2018 revival of “The Boys in the Band” in honor of the play’s 50th anniversary. It won a Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play.
He played Trent Oliver in Netflix’s 2020 movie musical “The Prom” and in 2022 made his London stage debut originating the role of Jim Bakker in the musical “Tammy Faye” nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical. He reunited in 2023 with “Book of Mormon” co-star Josh Gad for a limited Broadway production of “Gutenberg! The Musical!”
Rannells came out as gay at age 18 to family and friends and has been in a relationship with actor Tuc Watkins since they met during “The Boys in the Band” revival, it was reported in 2019.
In his book “Too Much Is Not Enough: A Memoir of Fumbling Toward Adulthood” (2019), he alleged being assaulted by a Catholic priest during the sacrament of confession: “I felt safe and heard and understood. Then, with unexpected force, he kissed me. On the lips. He muscled his tongue into my mouth and held the back of my head still. Then he released me and made the sign of the cross on my forehead. He smiled,” Rannells wrote, adding that he “walked away, stunned.”
He tried to avoid the priest during the rest of the school year but he was included on the guest list at Rannell’s graduation party at home. As the priest prepared to leave the party, “he grabbed me by the back of the neck and forced his tongue in my mouth. I just stood there and let him. I didn’t kiss back, but I also didn’t move. He smiled at me and walked to his car. I went into our kitchen and slammed a glass of wine before going back out to the party.”
He wrote much of his second memoir, “Uncle of the Year” (2023), during the pandemic lockdown. It was published when he was 45. According to a fairly lukewarm review in the Bay Area Reporter for the book’s purported omissions, the reviewer continued: “Rannells is one of the few recognizable openly gay actors today, so we want to grasp the challenges that status has engendered in his life. Ultimately, Rannells is such a delightful talented companion we want to hear more.”
PHOTO: Rannells at the 2025 premiere of “Liberation” on Broadway, photo by Philip Romano under CC 4.0.
“It was time to leave high school, it was time to leave the Catholic Church, it was time to leave Omaha, and it was time to leave this idea that I had to go along with whatever older man was calling the shots, behind. I was eighteen years old, and I couldn’t be anybody’s altar boy anymore.”
— From Rannells' book "Too Much Is Not Enough: A Memoir of Fumbling Toward Adulthood"
Compiled by Bill Dunn
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
On this date in 1982, physicist and feminist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein was born in Los Angeles. She was raised primarily by her mother, Margaret Prescod, who immigrated from Barbados as a teen and co-founded International Black Women for Wages for Housework in 1974 and later hosted and produced Sojourners in Los Angeles. Sam Weinstein, her father, worked for the gas company and as a labor organizer with European Jewish descent. Her parents separated when she was 5.
When she was 10, she went with her mother to see the Errol Morris documentary “A Brief History of Time” about Stephen Hawking, whose book had the same title. She begged her mom to buy the book but “she was worried it would be too hard and discouraged me. Her brother, my Uncle Peter, bought it for me as an 11th birthday gift a few months later. After that, I looked Stephen Hawking up and emailed him to ask how to become a theoretical physicist. One of his grad students responded.” (Black Perspectives, Aug. 29, 2016)
She lists Hawking’s 1988 work as the popular science book that influenced her most, along with “Cosmos” (1980) by Carl Sagan. “Prescod-Weinstein recalls teaching herself calculus and physics when her high school ran out of classes at her level; she grew up reading the New York Times each morning on the school bus and spent a year carrying around the complete works of William Shakespeare.” (Huffington Post, Dec. 7, 2017)
She earned a B.S. in physics, astrophysics and astronomy in 2003 from Harvard University, followed by a master’s in astronomy and astrophysics from the University of California-Santa Cruz in 2005 and a Ph.D. in physics and astronomy from the University of Waterloo in Canada.
Her doctoral dissertation was titled “Cosmic Acceleration as Quantum Gravity Phenomenology” in 2010. “I am a Star Trek fanatic. I believe in the Vulcan philosophy of ‘infinite diversity in infinite combinations’ even as I rail against what I call the diversity-and-inclusion racket here on Earth. … I believe the Universe is always more amazing than we think it is. Because science is a human endeavor, I am constantly working to ensure that everyone has an equitable opportunity to participate.” (Germantown Jewish Centre, undated)
She held postdoctoral fellowships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the Observational Cosmology Lab at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, then worked as as a physics research associate at the University of Washington before joining the physics, women’s and gender studies program at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, gaining tenure in 2023.
She is a rare bird academically, writing in 2017: “In 2010, I became the 69th Black American woman to get a PhD in physics. As of next Weds there will be 78 of us. #BlackWomenAppreciationDay”
What does her work involve? Her “keywords” on her curriculum vitae are cosmology, particle physics, axions, inflation, dark matter, quantum field theory, general relativity, neutron stars. Her website further describes it:
“I have a secondary area of expertise in an area of thought that I call Black Feminist Science, Technology, and Society Studies. … In relation, I maintain a Decolonising Science Reading List. Drawing from sociology of science, philosophy of science, Black studies, Black/queer feminist thought, and science and society studies, I illuminate how social phenomena shape knowledge outcomes in physics.”
Prescod-Weinstein identifies as “queer/agender” and has written about the collapse of her first marriage “under the pressure of many things, including my wife’s family’s homophobia.” (Ibid., Huffington Post) Her second marriage was to a Jewish Taiwanese-American who practices law.
“I’m ethnically Ashkenazi Jewish, so I come to it not as a belief system but as an identity I was born to. Jewishness isn’t just a religion, it’s also a series of cultural and ethnic identities,” Prescod-Weinstein writes: “In Reconstructionist Judaism, the branch I practice in, G-d is not necessarily a supernatural presence, but rather a concept that holds space for how we spiritually connect with our sense of what the universe is about, what life is about. For me, Jewish texts are an important ethical guide, something to think with.” (Clark University News, Sept. 28, 2023)
PHOTO: Courtesy of Prescod-Weinstein
“But I’m an agnostic atheist. I don’t have any faith in the supernatural.”
— Interview, Clark University News (Sept. 28, 2023)
Compiled by Bill Dunn
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
