Born in 1923 – Shūsaku Endō, Japanese novelist.

“Christ did not die for the good and beautiful. It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful; the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt.”

-Fr. Rodrigues in Endō‘s 1966 novel, Silence.

Born in 1874 – Robert Frost, American poet.

“I believe in teaching, but I don’t believe in going to school.”

Born in 1925 – Flannery O’Connor, American writer.

“For me it is the virgin birth, the incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified.”

Born in 1886 – Edward Weston, American photographer.

Above: Weston’s Pepper No. 30 (1930)

Born in 1910 – Akira Kurosawa, Japanese filmmaker.

“To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.”

Above: Machiko Kyô in Kurosawa’s 1950 film, Rashomon.

Born in 1949 – Slavoj Žižek, Slovenian sociologist, philosopher, and academic.

“The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active’, to ‘participate’, to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.”

Previously: Eric Rohmer

Born in 1889 – Harry Clarke, Irish stained-glass artist and illustrator.

Above: A Clarke window depicting St. Patrick,  (1925) St. Michael’s Church, Ballinasloe, County Galway, Ireland.

Born in 1903 – Adolph Gottlieb, American painter and sculptor.

Above: Gottlieb’s Dialogue I (1960)

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1475 – Michelangelo, Italian painter and sculptor.

Pictured: Detail from the Sistine ceiling, The Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve.

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Born in 1922 – Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italian director, screenwriter, and actor.

Above, a still from Pasolini’s film, The Gospel According to St. Matthew.