Bernard Mayes died last week at 85. He was an amazing person I'd never heard of until reading his obituary.
Bernard Mayes Obituary
From his obit:
He was the first board chairman of National Public Radio. He was a journalist, a gay rights activist, a university dean, a classics scholar who translated plays from the Greek, and an Anglican priest who became an assertive and sardonic nonbeliever. He was the voice of Gandalf on a radio adaptation of "Lord of the Rings," and he provided comfortingly elegant British narration for dozens of audio books.
And in 1962, he founded America's first suicide hotline — a service he conceived when, as a BBC correspondent, he filed dispatches about despairing people in his adopted hometown of San Francisco killing themselves at three times the national rate.
and
...He had long since dropped his faith. Souls do not exist, he proclaimed. Prayer is futile. Religion "excluded half of humanity and decimated the other half," he said, but "its narrow views … were mere peccadilloes compared with the inherent falsity of its basic claim to explain existence."
But he was enthusiastic about "soup-ism" — a belief that every element in the endless, timeless universe is as interdependent as the ingredients in a good minestrone.
He wrote a manifesto about it in 2010.
Has anyone read his book
Escaping God's Closet: The Revelations of a ***** Priest? I ordered it and suspect it will be a good read. I can't imagine anyone who worked for the BBC and did half of what he did wouldn't write a good book.
tsk, tsk... The CD bleeped word starts with Q and is a synonym for gay.
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