Curated category
Founders of religions
- JesusJesus was a 1st-century Jewish preacher in the Roman province of Judaea, and he is the central figure of the world's largest religion.
- MosesMoses is the Hebrew prophet credited with leading an entire people out of slavery, receiving the foundational laws of three world religions, and dying at the…
- AkbarAkbar was fourteen years old when Bairam Khan enthroned him on a newly built platform at Kalanaur in Punjab and proclaimed him Shahanshah, the Persian title…
- Henry VIIIHenry VIII once dressed all in yellow, with a white feather in his bonnet, the day after he learned that Catherine of Aragon had died.
- John CalvinJohn Calvin once described God's predestination as a decree dreadful indeed, writing in Latin, "Decretum quidem horribile, fateor." This was a man who could…
- AkhenatenAkhenaten, the tenth ruler of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty, did something no pharaoh had dared before: he erased the gods.
- John WesleyOn the evening of the 24th of May 1738, John Wesley went very unwillingly to a religious society on Aldersgate Street in London.
- Thomas CranmerThomas Cranmer was born on the 2nd of July 1489 in the village of Aslockton in Nottinghamshire, England, a younger son from a modest gentry family with deep…
- Maximilien RobespierreMaximilien Robespierre was born in Arras on the 6th of May 1758. Thirty-six years later, on the 28th of July 1794, he was executed without trial, sent to the…
- MuhammadMuhammad was born in Mecca around the year 570, into the Banu Hashim clan of the Quraysh tribe. His father died before he was born.
- The BuddhaNo written record of Siddhartha Gautama survives from his lifetime, nor from the century or two that followed. Yet from the middle of the 3rd century BCE…
- Martin LutherMartin Luther stood before the Diet of Worms on the 17th of April 1521, a German priest summoned to answer for his own books. The Emperor Charles V presided.
- MahaviraMahavira, born with the name Vardhamana, spent twelve and a half years without sitting down. He stood through monsoons, endured animals biting at his flesh…
- ConfuciusConfucius asked a single question when he came home from court and learned that the stables had burned down. He said, "Was anyone hurt?" He did not ask about…
- OrpheusOrpheus was a Thracian bard whose music, the ancient Greeks believed, could move rivers from their courses and coax rocks into dance.
- John KnoxJohn Knox was born sometime between 1505 and 1515 in Haddington, a small county town in East Lothian, Scotland. He died on the 24th of November 1572.
- LaoziLaozi has no birth certificate, no agreed-upon grave, and possibly no single body at all. Yet Chinese tradition credits this figure with writing the Tao Te…
- Adi ShankaraAdi Shankara is today often called the most important Indian philosopher, yet reliable information on his actual life is scant.