(12 November 1867 – 10 January 1955)
Joseph Martin McCabe was born at 14 Chestergate, Macclesfield, Cheshire, but his family moved to Manchester, near Gorton Monastery, while he was a child. He trained there as a Franciscan Friar from the age of 15.
Father Antony
His novitiate year took place in Killarney, after which he was moved to St Bonaventure’s School, Forest [...]
Categories: People, activist, writer, novelist, poet
(1864 – 1940)
Gustav Spiller was a member of the Ethical Societies that preceded the modern Humanist movement. He wrote a number of secular hymns and books including a history of these Societies, and on psychology.
Spiller was a Jew born in Budapest, Hungary but later naturalised as English.
By the late 1880’s Spiller worked for the Labour Office of [...]
Categories: People, activist, writer, novelist, poet
Johanna Mary [Hanna] Sheehy-Skeffington, (1877-1946)
Francis Sheehy-Skeffington (1878–1916)
Owen Lancelot Sheehy-Skeffington (1909-1970)
The Sheehy-Skeffingtons – the feminist and Irish nationalist Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, her husband, the pacifist, suffragist and writer, Francis, and their son, Owen, a founder member of the Humanist Association or Ireland – were notable Irish atheists.
Hanna and Francis
Born into the Roman Catholic tradition and educated by [...]
Categories: activist, politician, writer, novelist, poet
(11 August 1857 – 15 February 1944)
Stanton George Coit co-founded the Union of Ethical Societies, which was the forerunner of the present British Humanist Association.
Coit was born in Columbus, Ohio. He studied at Amherst College, Massachusetts, 1879, and became an aide of Felix Adler who had founded the Society for Ethical Culture in New York [...]
Categories: People, activist, politician
(1 September 1868 – 4 February 1954)
Chapman Cohen was a leading English atheist and secularist writer and lecturer.
In 1893 Cohen spoke at the Leicester Secular Society. In 1915 he became president of the National Secular Society until 1949.
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(5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883)
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German political philosopher who wrote about economics and politics. His ideas played a significant role in the development of modern communism.
Marx argued that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, would inevitably produce internal tensions which would lead to its destruction. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, [...]
Categories: People, activist, philosopher
(November 23, 1903 – May 10, 1983)
Margaret Kennedy Knight was a psychologist, broadcaster and humanist.
Born in Hertfordshire, England, Knight went to Girton College, Cambridge University. In her third year there she found the “moral courage”, as she put it, to finally abandon the religious beliefs she had long been uneasy with.
Psychologist
Between 1926 and 1936 Knight worked as a [...]
Michael Wright was a Leicester businessman who along with Josiah Gimson bought the majority of share in a Leicester Secular Hall Company in order to finance the construction of Leicester Secular Hall, home of Leicester Secular Society.
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Charles Watts was a prominent freethinker. His son Charles Albert Watts founded of the Rationalist Press Association.
Charles Albert Watts was the son of the prominent freethinker Charles Watts and founder of the Rationalist Press Association.
He founded it to “assist in securing the amendment of the law which sanctions the confiscation of property left for anti-theological purpose, and to promote the issuing, advertising, and circulation of publication devoted Freethought and Advanced Religious reform.” (Blasphemy Depot, p. [...]