Intellect PlusReligious figures
385 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 5 of 7.
A defrocked Catholic priest can still perform valid sacramentsRemoving a priest from the clergy does not, in Catholic teaching, erase what ordination gave him. Sacraments he performs afterwards count as valid, though forbidden. Some Orthodox…
An early Christian handbook vanished for centuries, then turned up in 1873Church writers quoted it, argued over whether it belonged in the Bible, and then lost it. In 1873 a Greek metropolitan found a complete copy of the Didache, made in 1056, in a mon…
Irenaeus waited more than eighteen centuries to be named a Doctor of the ChurchThe Catholic Church has granted its highest teaching honour to only 38 saints. Alphonsus Liguori got it 84 years after his death; Irenaeus of Lyons waited over 1,800, partly becau…
Dorothy Day went from bohemian radical to the Catholic Worker's founding editorIn 1933 a one-cent newspaper appeared on New York streets promising that the Catholic Church had a social program. Its editor had picketed the White House for suffrage, befriended…
Salazar's Estado Novo ran Portugal for four decades on Catholic corporatismFor more than forty years Portugal was governed by a regime that rejected parties, unions of class struggle and liberal democracy alike, drawing its blueprint from papal encyclica…
King Faisal modernised Saudi Arabia after decades as its chief diplomatAt thirteen, Faisal was sent to London in place of an older brother who had died of Spanish flu, becoming the first Saudi royal to visit England. He went on to run his country's f…
Mexico's biggest state hides a canyon system deeper than the Grand CanyonChihuahua is famous for a desert and a tiny dog, but Mexico's largest state is also its second most forested. Its Copper Canyon system is bigger and deeper than the Grand Canyon, …
Christianity's holiest church was built over a Roman temple to AphroditeAround AD 135 the emperor Hadrian filled in a rock-cut tomb in Jerusalem and built a temple to Aphrodite on top. Two centuries later Constantine had the temple torn down to uncove…
Castile gave the world the Spanish language and claimed the AmericasThe Crown of Castile began in 1230 as a union of two Iberian kingdoms. Within three centuries it had sponsored Columbus, absorbed the Aztec and Inca empires as Castilian possessio…
Roman and Jewish historians independently confirm Jesus was crucified under PilateScholars disagree about much in the Gospels, but almost all accept that Jesus was crucified, most likely in AD 30 or 33. Part of the reason is that non-Christian writers mention i…
The first millennial saint was a teenage coder from MilanCarlo Acutis taught himself programming, built websites for his parish and catalogued Eucharistic miracles online before dying of leukaemia at fifteen in 2006. In September 2025 h…
Did the Cathars exist, or did the Inquisition invent them?Medieval churchmen described the Cathars as heretics who worshipped two gods and believed human souls were angels trapped in matter. Thousands died in the crusade and inquisition …
The fireworks Catherine wheel honours a saint who may never have livedCatherine of Alexandria, the scholar-princess said to have out-argued 50 pagan philosophers, was one of the most revered saints of the late Middle Ages. Her spiked wheel even name…
Why a Catholic Bible has seven more books than a Protestant oneOpen a Catholic Bible and you will count 73 books; most Protestant Bibles have 66, while the Ethiopian Church recognises 81. The difference lies largely in seven Old Testament boo…
America's bishops built one university, and Yeats came to admire itThe Catholic University of America is the only college founded by the US Catholic bishops, chartered by a papal encyclical in 1889 and started with a heiress's $300,000 pledge. It…
Billie Jean King bought her first racket with eight dollars of savingsHer parents steered her away from softball towards something more ladylike, so at 11 Billie Jean Moffitt saved $8, bought a racket and took free lessons on Long Beach's public cou…
The Bible book that tells you both to answer a fool and not toProverbs 26:4 advises against replying to a fool in the fool's own terms. The very next verse advises doing exactly that. Contradictions like this nearly got Proverbs dropped from…
Luther coined a word to condemn followers who took him too farMartin Luther taught that faith, not good deeds, saves. Some followers concluded that believers were therefore free of God's moral law altogether. Luther was horrified, invented t…
Archangels rank second from the bottom of heaven's hierarchyThe title sounds supreme, since arch means chief. Yet in the angelic ranking drawn up by Pseudo-Dionysius in the 5th or 6th century, archangels are the second-lowest order. The Ne…
The world's most performed living composer found his voice through years of silenceAs a boy, Arvo Pärt could only play the highest and lowest notes of his family's piano, because the middle was broken. Decades later, after Soviet censure and eight near-silent ye…
The term baby boomer first described a coming college crushThe phrase baby boomer first appeared in a January 1963 newspaper article warning that a flood of students was about to hit American colleges. The cohort it described, usually dat…
Why historians trust the awkward story of Jesus's baptismHistorians rank the baptism of Jesus by John, alongside the crucifixion, among the two most certain facts about his life. The reason is revealing: early Christians had every motiv…
How an obscure apostle became patron of bookbinders, tanners and hospitalsThe gospels say almost nothing about Bartholomew beyond his name on the list of the twelve. Yet legend turned him into the patron of leatherworkers, bookbinders, butchers and even…
Beatification is the Catholic step that can still be pausedDeclaring someone a saint is treated by most Catholic theologians as infallible and permanent. The step before it, beatification, is not. It grants a revocable permission for loca…- The Bible's Antichrist appears only in two short lettersThe word antichrist shows up in the New Testament only in the letters of John, and there it seems to describe many people, not one villain: anyone who denies that Jesus is the Chr…
Abaddon began as a place and only later became a destroying angelIn the Hebrew Bible, Abaddon is not a being at all but a realm of ruin, paired with Sheol, the resting place of the dead. Only in the Book of Revelation does the word step out as …
Socrates insisted nobody knowingly chooses the worse option. Your phone disagrees.You know you should study, and you scroll instead. Greek philosophers called this akrasia, acting against your own better judgment. Socrates argued it cannot really happen, since …
One college class set Al Gore on the road to a Nobel Peace PrizeIn his final year at Harvard, a mediocre science student named Al Gore took a course with the oceanographer Roger Revelle, an early theorist of global warming. The spark lasted. D…
Anathema originally meant a gift offered to the godsToday calling something anathema means you detest it. The Greek word behind it meant the opposite mood entirely: an offering, something dedicated. The route from sacred gift to fo…- The Father of All Monks spent twenty years sealed inside a Roman fortAt thirty-five, Anthony of Egypt shut himself inside an abandoned fort by the Nile, and for about two decades food was tossed to him over the wall. When he finally emerged around …
- Vyasa wrote the Mahabharata and fathered both sides of its warHindu tradition credits the sage Vyasa with composing the Mahabharata, splitting the one Veda into four and writing the eighteen major Puranas. He is also a character inside his o…
Zhiyi built Chinese Buddhism's first great home-grown system of thoughtOrphaned by war at seventeen and a monk by eighteen, Zhiyi went on to found the Tiantai school, which spread to Korea, Japan and Vietnam. The scholar David Chappell ranks him besi…
Zoroaster's name probably means something like 'he who manages camels'The prophet behind one of the world's oldest surviving faiths may have been named for handling camels. Nobody even agrees when he lived: estimates stretch across a thousand years,…
Ramanuja challenged Shankara and opened temple worship to castes long kept outsideTradition says Ramanuja lived for 120 years; historians prefer roughly 1077 to 1157. Either way, this Tamil philosopher broke with his teacher, argued that liberation comes throug…
One short verse about causes turned a wandering sceptic into the Buddha's wisest discipleUpatissa had tried a sceptic teacher and walked away unsatisfied. Then a calm monk recited four lines saying everything arises from causes and ceases when they cease. That stanza,…
Sri Aurobindo deliberately flunked a riding test to escape the British civil serviceRaised in England from the age of seven, Aurobindo Ghosh placed 11th of 250 in the Indian Civil Service exam, then skipped the horse-riding test on purpose. Back in India he becam…- A sceptical Calcutta student who mocked his guru's visions later electrified ChicagoNarendranath Datta read Hume, Kant and Spencer, asked every notable in Calcutta whether they had seen God, and dismissed Ramakrishna's trances as hallucinations. A decade later, a…
No writing survives from the Buddha's lifetime; the first comes from an emperor's pillarSiddhartha Gautama founded one of the world's great religions, yet nothing was written about him for one or two centuries after he died. The earliest firm trace is Emperor Ashoka'…- Henry VIII's archbishop secretly married a Lutheran's niece while still a Catholic priestThomas Cranmer was a little-known Cambridge don when the Boleyn family helped make him Archbishop of Canterbury. Within months he annulled Henry VIII's first marriage and crowned …
- Legend says Sanskrit poetry began when Valmiki cursed a hunter who shot a craneHindu tradition hails Valmiki as the first poet. The story goes that grief at watching a hunter kill one of a pair of cranes forced a couplet out of him, the first shloka, and he …
- Vasubandhu wrote the standard textbook of one Buddhist school, then critiqued it in his own notesVasubandhu condensed the orthodox Sarvastivada system into a set of verses, then added a commentary that often picks those verses apart. Later, persuaded by his half-brother Asang…
- Tibetans call him the second Buddha, yet almost nothing about Nagarjuna's life is certainNagarjuna's verses on emptiness steered Indian thought for a thousand years and still anchor Mahayana Buddhism from Tibet to Japan. His biography, though, is a thicket of legends:…
The Buddha's cousin and attendant whose memory reportedly preserved most of the sermonsAnanda served the Buddha for 25 years, fetching water, guarding his door at night and once stepping in front of a rampaging elephant. After his teacher died, tradition says he rec…
Tibet's Lotus-Born guru was hired, in the oldest telling, to subdue angry local godsWhen floods and lightning convinced Tibet's court that local spirits opposed Buddhism, a tantric adept from Oddiyana was called in to tame them. Padmasambhava cleared the way for …
Steve Jobs ordered 500 copies of this guru's autobiography for his own memorialParamahansa Yogananda sailed to Boston in 1920 as a delegate to a religious congress and stayed for three decades. He dined at Coolidge's White House, packed lecture halls, drew F…- Patanjali of the Yoga Sutras was probably not the famous grammarian of the same nameTradition praises one sage Patanjali for purifying the mind with yoga, speech with grammar and the body with medicine. Most modern scholars see at least two or three different men…
Luther's Greek professor wrote the Reformation's defining confession, and Luther disliked its tonePhilipp Melanchthon arrived at Wittenberg at 21 to teach Greek and became the Reformation's first systematic theologian. He drafted the Augsburg Confession of 1530 while Luther wa…- A village boy who hated arithmetic became the Bengali mystic behind the Ramakrishna OrderRamakrishna left school at fourteen, spoke rustic Bengali and never mastered sums. Yet as a priest at a Calcutta Kali temple he tried Tantric, Vedantic, Christian and Sufi practic…
- A 16-year-old's sudden fear of dying became Ramana Maharshi's lifelong question: who am I?In July 1896 a Madurai schoolboy lay rigid, gripped by the sense that he was about to die, and asked himself what exactly would perish. Six weeks later he slipped away by train to…
The grandson of a convert whose hadith book Sunnis rank just below the QuranBorn in Bukhara in 810 and orphaned of his father as a baby, Muhammad al-Bukhari reportedly held more than 600,000 narrations in memory. From them he distilled about 7,563 into a …- An 18th-century Najdi preacher whose alliance with the Saud family still shapes ArabiaMuhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was chased out of Basra for preaching against shrine veneration. Back in central Arabia he struck a pact with Muhammad bin Saud, and the power-sharing d…
A Safavid philosopher argued existence comes before essence, centuries before Paris cafés didIn 17th-century Shiraz, Mulla Sadra claimed that things must first exist before they can have any nature at all. Condemned by some clerics and forced into rural retreat, he return…
Imam Muslim's hadith book overlaps with al-Bukhari's by thousands of reportsMuslim ibn al-Hajjaj of Nishapur befriended al-Bukhari and built a rival collection of sound hadith. Early critics grumbled that he left out too much and trusted weak narrators, y…- A Hindu champion of the Vedas who argued there is no creator GodKumārila Bhaṭṭa fought hard for the supreme authority of Vedic scripture against Buddhist rivals. Yet the same seventh-century thinker rejected the idea of a supreme deity, reason…
- Madhvacharya left an Advaita monastery to argue soul and God are forever distinctTrained in a monastery that taught the soul and God are ultimately one, the young monk Madhva kept arguing with his guru until he walked out. The dualist Dvaita school he founded …
- Nobody agrees when Mahavira lived, give or take a centuryJains honour Mahavira as the twenty-fourth and last ford-maker of our cosmic age, a prince who gave everything away at about thirty. Tradition dates his birth to 599 BCE, but hist…
The Imam of Medina wrote one of Islam's oldest surviving law booksMalik ibn Anas hardly needed to travel: the learning of early Islam came to him in Medina. His Muwatta is among the earliest Muslim legal texts still in existence, the chain of tr…
A thunderstorm sent Martin Luther into a monastery instead of law schoolIn July 1505 a lightning bolt struck near a young law student riding back to Erfurt. Terrified of death and judgement, Martin Luther became a friar. Twelve years later his Ninety-…
Christian Science grew out of a New England mesmerist's treatment roomMary Baker Eddy spent decades in poor health, lost a husband, her mother and a fiancé within a few years, and gave up her son. After sessions with the mesmerist Phineas Quimby and…
The Buddha's second chief disciple was converted by a verse he heard secondhandTwo boyhood friends made a pact: whoever found the truth first would tell the other. One met a monk who summed up the Buddha's teaching in a single stanza about causes, and passed…