A question of faith

His outspoken ruminations on the nature of religion have at times landed him in hot water – only making the fact that supposedly staunch atheist Stephen Fry was once aiming for a priesthood all the more intriguing.

When drafting a list of entertainers who might, in another life, have swapped their career in showbusiness for a more religious vocation, it would be fair to assume that Stephen Fry’s name would be a surprising inclusion. Indeed, the Hampstead-born, Cambridge-educated intellectual has often been open about his atheistic inclinations – even going so far as to have been awarded the Annual Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism by the Harvard Secular Society in 2011.

And yet for all of Fry’s apparent misalignment with organised religion in particular, there’s something about his expansive intelligence, idiosyncratic voice, and refusal to shy away from the deepest of debate topics that lends itself to critical discourse on the subject of faith.

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