January 1
Ira Glass
On this date in 1959, radio personality Ira Glass was born to Jewish parents in Baltimore, Md. While in college he interned at National Public Radio, where he worked after graduating from Brown University with a degree in semiotics in 1982. Glass worked as a production assistant for “All Things Considered” and then as a reporter for National Public Radio, spending a year in a high school and a year in an elementary school reporting on education.
In 1989 he moved to Chicago to co-host a show called “The Wild Room.” In 1995 the radio program “This American Life” debuted, produced and narrated by Glass. By 2016 it was reaching over 4 million listeners each week. In 2013 the WBEZ board voted to raise his salary from $170,000 to $278,000 but he asked for it to be lowered to $146,000 the next year, calling the original sum “unseemly.” He supplements his income with speaking engagements.
Glass says that his family was always secular and that he stopped believing in God soon after his bar mitzvah at age 13: “I found I just didn’t believe in God.” (Chicago Tribune, Dec. 14, 2000.)
Glass married writer and editor Anaheed Alani in 2005. “We have the entire Middle East crisis in our house,” he joked. “Her mom is Christian and her dad is Muslim, from Iraq.” They divorced in 2018. He has won numerous industry awards and was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2014.
PHOTO: Glass at the 2013 Peabody Awards.
“And for whatever reasons now, I have a bunch of friends, my wife and I have a bunch of friends, who are very devout religious people. And we hang out with them, and we share our lives with them, but they are no influence at all in pulling us towards Christianity away from our staunch atheism, and vice versa.”
— Glass, "This American Life" (Dec. 14, 2017)
Compiled by Eleanor Wroblewski
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
Brian Cox
On this date in 1968, Brian Edward Cox was born in Lancashire, England. After completing his secondary education, Cox joined the rock band Dare as a keyboardist. Following the band’s breakup, Cox enrolled at the University of Manchester to study physics. He continued his career in music, playing with the pop band D:Ream, while receiving his B.Sc. and M.Phil degrees. D:Ream had several hits on the UK charts, including “Things Can Only Get Better,” a No. 1 hit.
As of this writing he works as a particle physicist at the University of Manchester and at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. He married Gia Milinovich in 2003 and they have one child. He was elected in 2016 as a Fellow of the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of sciences.
Cox is best known for his science outreach to the general public and has appeared on numerous BBC television and radio programs. Cox also lectures widely, has given several TED talks, and has co-authored several books about physics, including 2009’s Why Does E=mc²? (And Why Should We Care?).
Cox is a strong advocate for science education and government funding of scientific research. Asked by the Guardian (March 6, 2010) if he has “ever believed in God,” Cox replied, “No! I was sent to Sunday school for a few weeks but I didn’t like getting up on Sunday mornings. But some of my friends are religious. I don’t have a strong view on religion, other than illogical religion. Young earth creationism, for example: bollocks.”
Cox says the label of atheist does not apply to him because there is so much that is unknowable. His story “The Large Hadron Collider: A Scientific Creation Story” was one of 42 included in “The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas” in 2009. From the essay: “When the pattern of atoms known as you ceases to be, the building blocks will return to the voids of space and in a billion years or more they may take their place in another structure so beautiful that a future mind may perceive it to be the work of a god.”
PHOTO: The Royal Society
“So for me, the idea I would be able to have an entertaining and enjoyable afternoon discussing with people with whom I suppose I have to say I disagree at the most fundamental level, because I don’t have a particular faith, or any faith in fact – however, I think that difference of opinion and view of the world is to be celebrated and explored.”
— "Professor Brian Cox condemns 'toxic' rows between science and religion," Christian Today (Sept. 9, 2016)
Compiled by Eleanor Wroblewski
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
Louis “Studs” Terkel
On this date in 1912, Louis Terkel was born in the Bronx, N.Y., the third son of Samuel Terkel, a tailor, and the former Anna Finkel, an emigrant from Bialystok, Poland. A spirited man, he called himself an agnostic. Life was about life, not looking ahead to death, said Terkel, who spent most of his 96 years on Earth in Chicago.
As an actor in the theater he took the name Studs, after James T. Farrell’s fictional Studs Lonigan. He earned degrees in law and philosophy, was part of the Federal Writers’ Project and worked in radio drama and scriptwriting. He created his own radio show in 1945, a blend of music, interviews and commentary.
“Studs’ Place,” his first TV show, went on the air in 1950 but was soon canceled due to NBC’s nervousness about Terkel’s left-wing politics. He was back on the radio before long at WFMT, where his on-air career flourished for decades. He interviewed Bertrand Russell in Wales in 1962 when Russell was 90. “In the course of nature, I will soon die,” Russell told him. “My young friends have the right to many fruitful years. Let them call me fanatic.”
Division Street: America (1966) was Terkel’s first best-seller and became the blueprint for other literary oral histories like Hard Times, Working, The Good War, Race and Coming of Age. All told, he wrote 18 books. The last (in 2008) was P.S.: Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening. Terkel told AARP magazine (March/April 2006), “I think we’re capable of extraordinary things, human beings. I call that God-like.” He died at home in Chicago at age 96. (D. 2008)
“TIPPETT: So, you know, one thing that is very striking that I didn’t expect is that this book, your book about death, it’s really a very religious book.
— Interview with Krista Tippett on "Speaking of Faith," American Public Media, 2004
TERKEL: Religious book?
TIPPETT: Yes. I mean, there’s a lot of religion in it, all the way through it. I mean, did you know that, that those themes would be so prominent when you started it?
TERKEL: Well, I knew religion would play a role when I — to be fair, I happen to be an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is, don’t you?
TIPPETT: Oh, yeah.
TERKEL: A cowardly atheist. And I’m an agnostic. … You asked about the afterlife. Well, I can’t take bets on it. Who’s going to take my bet, you know? I, myself, don’t believe in any afterlife. I do believe in this life, and what you do in this life is what it’s all about.”
Compiled by Bill Dunn
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
Sarah Vowell
On this date in 1969, Sarah Jane Vowell was born in Muskogee, Okla., and moved with her family, which has Cherokee heritage, to Montana when she was 11. She has a fraternal twin sister, Amy. She majored in modern languages and literatures at Montana State University, where she received her B.A. in 1993 and went on to earn an M.A. in art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Vowell is the author of seven nonfiction books (as of this writing in 2019) as well as an essayist whose work has been published in The New York Times, Esquire, McSweeney’s and elsewhere.
Vowell has been a frequent contributor to public radio’s “This American Life” since 1996, the show’s first year. She voiced the character Violet in the film “The Incredibles” (2004).
Her books examine American history and the history of religion in America through a combination of road-trip memoir and insightful historical content. Assassination Vacation (2005) detailed presidential assassinations and 19th-century American history, including cults and quasi-religious themes. The Wordy Shipmates (2008) told the story of the Puritan settlement of Massachusetts and touched on the true origins of the idea of religious freedom in America as propounded by Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island exiled from Massachusetts Bay for his refusal to adhere to church doctrine.
Unfamiliar Fishes (2011) told the story of the loss of the traditional Hawaiian religion and inhabitants’ conversion to Christianity by missionaries from New England, along with the eventual U.S. conquest instigated by the first missionaries’ descendants in 1895. Lafayette in the Somewhat United States (2015) is an account of the Marquis de Lafayette, the young French aristocrat who became George Washington’s trusted officer and friend and an American celebrity.
She was asked in 2002 by The Onion AV Club “Is There a God?” She answered, “Absolutely not.” In a 2008 New York Times op-ed, she wrote, “I have become just another citizen whose only religion is the freedom of religion and as such I patrol the wall of separation between church and state like some jumpy East German guarding Checkpoint Charlie back before Ronald Reagan single-handedly tore it down.”
Vowell has never married or had children. She is on the advisory board of 826NYC, a nonprofit tutoring and writing center for students aged 6–18 in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Photo: Bennett Miller
“Because I am a culturally Christian atheist the same way my atheist Reform friends are culturally Jewish, I look forward to Martin Luther King’s Birthday — when the news momentarily replaces the rants of the faith-based spitfires with clips of what an actually Christlike Christian sounds like.”
— Vowell op-ed, New York Times (Jan. 21, 2008)
Compiled by Eleanor Wroblewski
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
