Pope John Paul II had a mixed legacy. Some good, some bad. But whatever your take on him, you have to give him this — the Pontiff could swing a good bat. Visiting California in 1987, the 67 year-old Pope headed to the batting cages and started lining singles and doubles, maybe even a few triples.

New Yorkers go out of their way to avoid Times Square, especially at this time of year. Whatever the season, it’s sure to be a mob scene of slow moving tourists, miserable Elmos, and loose screw loudmouths preaching messages of intolerance.

If digital technology poses any threat to the market for words printed on real paper—and the jury is still out on that one—then it must also be credited for exposing us to texts from the ancient world.

On December 7, 1972, the Apollo 17 crew took a photograph of earth that became known as “The Blue Marble” because of the whorling clouds above the continents. Not the first image of the earth from space, it remains one of the most arresting.

Nearly forty years after his death, the words of Alan Watts still generate excitement. Fans trade them, in the form of texts, radio broadcasts, recorded talks, and television programs, both online and off.

On January 28, 1948 the British philosophers F.C. Copleston and Bertrand Russell squared off on BBC radio for a debate on the existence of God. Copleston was a Jesuit priest who believed in God.

“Mr. Hefner’s magazine is most widely known for its total exposure of the human female,” says William F. Buckley, introducing the guest on this 1966 broadcast of his talk show Firing Line. “Though of course other things happen in its pages.

American friends who went studying abroad in the Great Britain of the 70s all have a story about discovering the Open University. They usually did so late at night, more than a little inebriated, and well into a bout of semi-exotic channel-flipping.

Albert Einstein endeavored to express his view of God as forthrightly as possible to a public eager to know where he stood in the popular conflict between science and religion. In 1936, a sixth-grade girl named Phyllis wrote him a letter on behalf of her Sunday School class.

Just yesterday, I sat across from a fellow wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the image of a gun-wielding Jesus blowing away Charles Darwin above the words “EVOLVE THIS!” At first I assumed he wore it to emphatically signal his belief that religion, specifically Christianity, refutes science, specifically biological evolution.