Parenting Beyond Belief Channel on YouTube
It has taken me a year and a half to bring the Parenting Beyond Belief Seminar to 19 cities. I currently have requests from 106 more.
Time for a more efficient way of doing things.
In 2010, I hope to be training seminar leaders across the country through Foundation Beyond Belief. In the meantime, I’ve just learned of a new medium called the “Inter-nets” through which I can post “viddy-ohs” about nonreligious parenting. Thought I’d give it a go.
The first in a planned series of 8,403 short, informal videos on nonreligious parenting is now on YouTube (and embedded below). We’ll start with a brief history of PBB, then dive into content with an average of one 7-10 minute video per week. The tentative summer schedule:
June 15: The, uh… “Genesis” of Parenting Beyond Belief
June 20: Four reasons kids need to be religiously literate
June 25: How to teach kids about religion…and how not to
June 30: What indoctrination is…and what it isn’t
August 5: “What if my child becomes religious?”
August 26: Introducing kids to evolution
We’ll continue with understanding moral development, talking about death, reaching across worldview lines, relaxing family tension, teaching kids to interact well with religious peers, talking about the body and sexuality, the pledge of allegiance, the “mixed marriage,” Santa Claus, and more. I hope they’re occasionally useful.
Best Practices 5: Encourage religious literacy
hortly after the release of Parenting Beyond Belief, I mentioned on the PBB Discussion Forum that I think religious literacy is an important thing for our kids (and ourselves) to have. Many agreed, as did most of the contributors to the book, but I received an email from one parent who asked,
Why should I fill my kids’ heads with all that mumbo-jumbo?
Here are my four reasons that religious literacy (knowledge of religion, as opposed to belief in it) is crucial:
1. To understand the world. A huge percentage of the news includes a religious component. Add the fact that 90 percent of our fellow humans express themselves through religion and it becomes clear that ignorance of religion cuts our children off from understanding what is happening in the world around them—and why.
2. To be empowered. In the U.S. presidential election of 2004, candidate Howard Dean identified Job as his favorite book of the New Testament. That Job is actually in the Old Testament was a trivial thing to most of us, but to a huge whack of the religious electorate, Dean had revealed a forehead-smacking level of ignorance about the central narrative of their lives. For those people, Dean was instantly discounted, irrelevant. Because we want our kids’ voices heard in the many issues with a religious component, it’s important for them to have knowledge of that component.
3. To make an informed decision. I really, truly, genuinely want my kids to make up their own minds about religion, and I trust them to do so. Any nonreligious parent who boasts of a willingness to allow their kids to make their own choices but never exposes them to religion or religious ideas is being dishonest. For kids to make a truly informed judgment about it, they must have access to it.
4. To avoid the “teen epiphany.” Here’s the big one. Struggles with identity, confidence, and countless other issues are a given part of the teen years. Sometimes these struggles generate a genuine personal crisis, at which point religious peers often pose a single question: “Don’t you know about Jesus?” If your child says, “No,” the peer will come back incredulously with, “YOU don’t know JESUS? Omigosh, Jesus is The Answer!” Boom, we have an emotional hijacking. And such hijackings don’t end up in moderate Methodism. This is the moment when nonreligious teens fly all the way across the spectrum to evangelical fundamentalism.
A little knowledge about religion allows the teen to say, “Yeah, I know about Jesus”—and to know that reliable answers to personal problems are better found elsewhere.
So should you take your kids to a mainstream, bible-believing church? Hardly. They shouldn’t get to age 18 without seeing the inside of a church, or you risk creating forbidden fruit. Take them once in a while just to see what it’s all about and to see that there’s no magical land of unicorns and faeries behind those doors. But know that churchgoing generally has squat to do with religious literacy.
In his (fabulous) book Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t, Stephen Prothero points out that faithfully churchgoing Americans are incredibly ignorant of even the most basic tenets of their own belief systems, not to mention others. Europeans, on the other hand, are religiously knowledgeable and rarely darken the door of a church.
Coincidence? I don’t think so. Most European countries have mandated religious education and decidedly secular populations. Unless they attend a UU or Ethical Society, U.S. kids have almost no religious education. Faith is most easily sustained in ignorance. Learning about religion leads to thinking about religion—and you know what happens then.
Mainstream churchgoing also exposes kids to a single religious perspective. That’s not literacy—in fact, it usually amounts to indoctrination.
So how do you get religiously literate kids?
1. Talk, talk, talk. All literacy begins with oral language. Toss tidbits of religious knowledge into your everyday conversations. If you drive by a mosque and your four-year-old points out the pretty gold dome, take the opportunity: “Isn’t that pretty? It’s a kind of church called a mosque. People who go there pray five times every day, and they all face a city far away when they do it.” No need to get into the Five Pillars of Islam. A few months later, you see a woman on the street wearing a hijab and connect it to previous knowledge: “Remember the mosque, the church with that gold dome? That’s what some people wear who go to that church.”
As kids mature, include more complex information—good, bad, and ugly. No discussion of Martin Luther King, Jr. is complete without noting that he was a Baptist minister, and that his religion was important to him. You can’t grasp 9/11 without understanding Islamic afterlife beliefs. And the founding of our country is reframed by noting that the majority of the founders were religious skeptics of one stripe or another. Talk about the religious components of events in the news, from the stem cell debate to global warming to terrorism to nonviolence advocacy.
2. Read myths of many traditions. Myths make terrific bedtime stories. Start with creation myths from around the world, then move into the many rich mythic traditions—Greek, Roman, Norse, Hopi, Inuit, Zulu, Indian, and more. And don’t forget the Judeo-Christian stories. Placing them side by side with other traditions removes the pedestal and underlines what they have in common.
3. Attend church on occasion with trusted relatives. Keeping kids entirely separated from the experience of church can make them think something magical happens there. If your children are invited by friends, say yes—and go along. The conversations afterward can be some of the most productive in your entire religious education plan.
4. Movies. One of the most effective and enjoyable ways to expose your kids to religious ideas is through movies. For the youngest, this might include Prince of Egypt, Little Buddha, Kirikou and the Sorceress, and Fiddler on the Roof. By middle school it’s Jason and the Argonauts, Gandhi, Bruce Almighty, and Kundun. High schoolers can see and enjoy Seven Years in Tibet, Romero, Schindler’s List, Jesus Camp, Dogma, and Inherit the Wind. This list alone touches eight different religious systems (seven more than they’ll get in a mainstream Sunday School) and both the positive and negative influences of religion in history (one more than you get in Sunday School).
Special gem: Don’t forget Jesus Christ Superstar, a subversive and thought-provoking retelling of the last days of Christ. There are no miracles; the story ends with the crucifixion, not the resurrection; and Judas is the hero, urging Jesus not to forget about the poor as the ministry becomes a personality cult.
Conditional joy in my inbox
I’m the sudden subject of a flurry of email conversion attempts. Not sure why that is. There was a bit of that when Parenting Beyond Belief launched in April ’07, but it’s been mostly quiet on the saving front since then.
Maybe it’s the release of Raising Freethinkers that’s put me back on the proselyscope.
I’ll share one of the more persistent correspondents sometime soon. But one recent message was less a conversion attempt than (I guess) a matter of content confusion — much like the Australian reporter who interviewed me for ten minutes about Parenting Beyond Belief before asking, “Now, you do believe in God, right?”
This one happens to be from the same corner of the world:
Dear Dale,
I am a preacher from Manila, Philippines. Aside from holding pastorate I am teaching in a Bible School. Quality books hone my life and ministry. Can I request your book PARENTING BEYOND BELIEF as a compliment? I know that there are generous authors that give books as complimentary copies. Your book could be the best gift this 2009.
Touching lives for Christ,
Pastor David
I thanked him for his interest and apologized for the need to decline. At this point in a book’s life, comps go out only to reviewers or media, if at all. I gave him the Amazon link. His gracious reply:
Hi,
Thanks and God bless! Celebrate life because God is amazing.
Pastor David
Now on most days I would let that go entirely, if only to avoid gumming up my already gummy inbox. But in certain moods, on certain days, I just can’t seem to leave well enough alone:
You are most welcome! And I celebrate life because life is amazing.
Dale
Humanist Parents Seek Communion Outside Church (Wash Post)
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 21, 2008; Page A10
BOSTON — They are not religious, so they don’t go to church. But they are searching for values and rituals with which to raise their children, as well as a community of like-minded people to offer support.
Dozens of parents came together on a recent Saturday to participate in a seminar on humanist parenting and to meet others interested in organizing a kind of nonreligious congregation, complete with regular family activities and ceremonies for births and deaths.
“It’s exciting to know that we could be meeting people who we might perhaps raise children with,” said Tony Proctor, 39, who owns a wealth management company and attended the seminar at Harvard University with his wife, Andrea, 35, a stay-at-home mother.
Humanism is both a formal movement and an informal identification of people who promote values of reason, compassion and human dignity. Although most humanists are atheists, atheism is defined by what is absent — belief in God — and humanists emphasize a positive philosophy of ethical living for the human good.
The seminar’s organizers wanted to reach out to people like the Proctors — first-time parents scrambling for guidance as they improvise how to raise their daughter without the religion of their childhood.
“I’m often told that when people have kids, they go back to religion,” said John Figdor, a humanist master’s of divinity student who helped organize the seminar. “Are we really not tending our own people?”
Across the country, religious observance hits a low for people in their mid-20s and steadily increases after that, “in conjunction with marriage and children,” said Tom Smith, of the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago, which has polled people about religious affiliation and practice for decades.
Religious congregations are good at supporting parenting, said Gregory Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard who organized the seminar. Although most humanists may not believe in God, he said, they do believe in sharing their lives with others who share their values.
“Why throw the baby out with the bath water?” Epstein asked.
Most Americans are religious and believe in God, but a growing number of people have no religious affiliation. In 1990, 8 percent of respondents in the General Social Survey said they identified with no religion. In 2006, the last year for which statistics are available, the figure had doubled to 16 percent.
In recent years, the chaplaincy at Harvard has hosted humanist speakers such as novelist Salman Rushdie, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen and U.S. Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.). Student interest is booming. But something happens when those students graduate, marry and become parents.
For the Proctors, especially for Andrea, who grew up in a Catholic household, arriving at the seminar took a lifetime of questioning.
Growing up, she attended church each Sunday, took Communion and was confirmed. She became disenchanted after a sex scandal at her parish was poorly handled, she said. Then in college, she was “exposed to a lot of different beliefs in religions and science. It causes you to question.”
Tony grew up fascinated by his neighbors’ ability to find community at church, which he sometimes attended with them. “Every Sunday they would go to church and see friends. That was a neat thing,” he said.
The Proctors found themselves making decisions about religion when they had a daughter last year. Andrea said her parents asked, “Of course you’re going to baptize her, right?” She answered, “Actually, no.”
Instead, Andrea did a Google search for someone who might perform a nonreligious ceremony to mark Sienna’s entry into the world and found Epstein, the Harvard humanist chaplain.
Epstein officiated at the ceremony, while both sets of grandparents spoke about their hopes and dreams for the child, Andrea said. The Proctors named “guide parents” instead of godparents.
By the time they got to the Harvard seminar more than a year later, they were ready to organize a larger community of families like themselves.
A room full of concertedly nonreligious people has its idiosyncrasies. At the seminar, someone sneezed, and there was a long silence — no one said “Bless you” or even “Salud” or “Santé.”
For sale were T-shirts saying “98% Chimpanzee” or showing a tadpole with the words “Meet Your Ancestor.” There were also children’s games from Charlie’s Playhouse, a Darwinian toy company, illustrating the process of evolution.
A recent study found that many Americans associate atheists with negative traits, including criminal behavior and rampant materialism.
People often ask, “How do you expect to raise your children to be good people without religion?” said Dale McGowan, the seminar leader and author of “Parenting Beyond Belief.” He suggested the retort might be something like, “How do you expect to raise your children to be moral people without allowing them to think for themselves?”1 He advocates exposing children to many religious traditions without imposing any.
At the seminar, Andrea Proctor was thrilled to meet another mother who would like to start a group of parents and children meeting weekly or biweekly.
“We just put a huge pool in our back yard,” Tony Proctor said. “We might have to start humanist barbecue pool parties.”
(Read and comment online. Caution: Many of the comments, as usual, are tending toward the vicious at the moment, so have some eggnog before you read them.)
_____________________________
1Robin did a nice job on this article, but this is not quite what I said. The quote above assumes that all religious parents do not allow their kids to think for themselves, a false and ridiculous assumption. For the record, my suggested reply to the question, “How are you going to raise your kids to be moral without religion?” was this: “Calmly reply, ‘Why, by avoiding moral indoctrination, of course, which research has shown to be the least effective way to encourage moral development. And what’s your plan?'” Oh well. I’m a silly, oversensitive monkey to even point it out.
PBB in the Harvard Gazette
One of the best articles yet on Parenting Beyond Belief and/or the seminars appeared Thursday in the Harvard Gazette. Many thanks to Cory Ireland for a thoughtful and positive piece.
Author McGowan is honored as ‘2008 Harvard Humanist of the Year’
By Corydon Ireland
Harvard News Office
Can parents raise moral children without religion?
Greg Epstein M.T.S. ’07 thinks so. He’s the Humanist chaplain at Harvard, and has just finished writing a book due out next fall. Its title: “Good Without God.”
Dale McGowan thinks so too. He edited the recent anthology “Parenting Beyond Belief: On Raising Ethical, Caring Kids Without Religion” (AMACOM, 2007). Last Saturday (Dec. 6), the Atlanta-based author was honored as 2008 Harvard Humanist of the Year, an award sponsored by Epstein’s office. He delivered the 16th annual Alexander Lincoln Lecture.
Previous honorees include the late television personality Steve Allen; biologist E.O. Wilson, Harvard’s Pellegrino University Professor emeritus; and Rep. Fortney H. “Pete” Stark (D-Calif.), who last year used his Lincoln lecture to formally out himself as the first openly Humanist member of Congress.
Cheerful, tall, and sporting a trim beard and wide smile, McGowan is the antithesis of the image of strident, hair-trigger Humanists — those with what he calls “UTT syndrome” (as in, “Unholier Than Thou”).
McGowan delivered the late-morning lecture at Boylston Hall’s Fong Auditorium, ate a lunch of burritos with his audience, then moderated an afternoon seminar on nonreligious parenting.
At a booth outside the auditorium was the lecture’s co-sponsor, Kate Miller, founder of the Providence, R.I.-based Charlie’s Playhouse, a maker of games and toys inspired by Darwin. Among them: a long narrow mat that condenses 600 million years of Earth timeline into 18 picture-packed feet of skipping surface; cards on ancient creatures; and what Miller said is her best-selling T-shirt, which bears the legend, “Product of Natural Selection.”
McGowan exudes a similar lightness. In both the lecture and seminar, he said, the operative word is “Relax.”
For one, relax about that morality question. Research shows that children arrive at moral values “reliably, and on time,” he said, as long as they grow up in a supportive environment.
Citing another study, McGowan related that at age 3 or 4 children are “universally selfish,” but by 7 or 8 they develop “a strong sense of fairness,” the foundation of a moral life.
In fact, research shows that indoctrination, often the focus of religious upbringing, is, more than anything else, what impedes moral development, claimed McGowan. “At the heart of indoctrination is the distrust of reason.”
Better off are children who get from their parents “an explicit invitation to disagree,” he said — that is, children “actively engaged in the refinement of their own moral development.”
Read the complete article here.
Congratulations, Dr. Ann
There are countless congratulatory messages for President-elect Obama this morning, all well-deserved. The most remarkably gifted presidential candidate of our time managed somehow to negotiate an unimaginably grueling campaign, and we, despite ourselves, managed to elect him. Shout-outs all around.
But I wanted to take a moment to recognize one of the people who by Barack’s own account helped make him what he is — his nonreligious mother, Ann Dunham.
It should be a matter of no small pride to nonreligious parents that the next President — a man who has been praised for his ethics, empathy, and broadmindedness — “was not raised in a religious household.”1 It’s the other, undiscussed first in this election — the first black President is also the first President with a completely nonreligious upbringing.
“For all her professed secularism,” he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, “my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known.” And even as she expressed her deeply-felt outrage over those aspects of organized religion that “dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety [and] cruelty and oppression in the garb of righteousness,” she urged her children to see the good as well as the bad. “Jesus, she felt, was a wonderful example,” said Barack’s half-sister Maya. “But she felt that a lot of Christians behaved in un-Christian ways.”2
Ann recognized the importance of religious literacy and saw to it that her children were exposed to a broad spectrum of religious ideas. “In her mind,” Obama wrote,
a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand that such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on my part–no introspective exertion or self-flagellation. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.3
Maya remembers Ann’s broad approach to religious literacy as well. “She basically gave us all the good books — the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the Buddhist scripture, the Tao Te Ching — and wanted us to recognize that everyone has something beautiful to contribute.”4
In this and several other respects, Ann Dunham was a nonreligious parent raising a child in the 1970s according to the exact philosophy of Parenting Beyond Belief — educating for tolerance and empathy, lifting up those religious ideas that are life-affirming while challenging and rejecting those that are life-destroying, and seeking the human foundations of joy, knowledge, and wonder of which religion is only a single expression — “and not necessarily the best.”
Barack went on to identify as a Christian. Whether this is a heartfelt position or a political necessity is less relevant than the kind of Christianity he has embraced — reasonable, tolerant, skeptical, and non-dogmatic. His examined and temperate faith is something he sees as deeply personal, possibly because he had the freedom to choose and shape it himself — precisely the freedom I want my children to have. It is difficult to picture this man forcing his religious opinions on others or using this or that bible verse to derail science or justify an arrogant foreign policy. It’s not going to happen.
It is impossible for me to picture this man claiming God has asked him to invade [insert country here] or that ours is a Judeo-Christian nation. In fact, when he lists various religious perspectives, there is an interesting new entry, every single time:
(Full speech here.)
Is it a coincidence that a child raised with the freedom and encouragement to think for himself chose such a moderate and thoughtful religious identity? Surely not. And if my kids choose a religious identity, I’m all the more confident now that they’ll do the same. 
Just like Ann Dunham, I don’t need to raise kids who end up in lockstep with my views. If our kids turn out anything like Barack Obama, Becca and I will consider our contribution to the world pretty damn impressive, regardless of the labels they choose to wear.
Neither do I think it’s a coincidence that the man who has inspired such trust, hope, and (yes) faith is the product of a home free of religious dogma. This is what comes of an intelligent and broadminded upbringing. It’s one of the key ingredients that have made him what he is.
So thank you, Ann, from all the nonreligious parents following in your footsteps. We now have a resounding answer for those who would question whether we can raise ethical, caring kids without religion:
Yes We Can.
________________________
1Audacity of Hope, p. 202.
2Ariel Sabar, “Barack Obama: Putting faith out front.” Christian Science Monitor, 06/16/07.
3Op cit, 203-4.
4Op. cit.
[Your City Here] Power!
Okay, folks, I’m throwing out the old algorithm for scheduling the seminar tour. Finding out firsthand where the interested folks are is ever so much more fun, and much more likely to build successful events.
Since posting Wednesday about the blizzard of requests I’d had from Austin to bring the parenting seminar there, the storm front has widened. I’ve received requests from 27 cities in the U.S., three in Canada, and one each in Belgium and the Netherlands. Woohoo! Time to get my shots!
But five cities stood out:
-
AUSTIN (44 requests)
PORTLAND, OREGON (18 requests)
CHICAGO (17 requests)
SEATTLE (17 requests)
NEW YORK (13 requests)
…so these folks are getting the first seminars in 2009.
If you’re in one of those cities and haven’t yet sent in your email address, please click on your city name above to do so. When the schedule’s set, you’ll be among the first to know. And I’d like to hear from anyone in those five cities who might be connected to a potential host organization that can provide the room and help with promotion. Click here to drop me a note.
Other places climbing the list:
ST. LOUIS and KANSAS CITY: I’m already in conversation with the Ethical Society of St. Louis and All Souls UU in Kansas City for a pair of Missouri seminars, probably in January.
FLORIDA: A good number of Florida parents have expressed interest. Unfortunately they are literally all over the map, in seven different cities. If any one Florida city can organize a strong enough blizzard of interest, I’ll point my Honda south.
ASHEVILLE/CHARLOTTE NC: About eight requests from western North Carolina. That’s a quick drive for me, so double that number and I’m there.
DENVER/COLORADO SPRINGS: Weather delayed my plane and forced the cancellation of my Colorado Springs seminar in June. We’ll get that horse back under sail soon.
MINNEAPOLIS (again), PHOENIX, and LOS ANGELES: I’ve received just a handful for each of these. I’ll need a larger indication of interest before I happily submit to the airport security cavity search for y’all.
And a few more remain to go in 2008:
CINCINNATI on September 20
IOWA CITY on September 27
DES MOINES on September 28
PALO ALTO CA on October 25
…and BOSTON on December 6, in conjunction with my Alexander Lincoln “Harvard Humanist of the Year” Lecture at Harvard. (Registration info to come.)
If you’d like to see the half-day seminar come your way, fill out the general request form and get other interested parents to do the same.
Here’s what some past participants have said about the event:
“Very positive, practical, humorous, ethical presentation!”
“Eye-opening, interesting…fascinating”
“Wonderful seminar, wonderful book!”
“Very powerful to be given these tools to help our children…fabulous!”
“I have never felt less alone. Thank you Dale”
“I wish we could have gone on all day!”
“An effective combination of humor and powerful information”
“The family spectrum exercise was so revealing. I don’t see myself as an island anymore”
“I came away with a more positive attitude about parenting than I can remember having, ever.”
“Exhilarating, informative, fun”
Austin Power!
- September 10, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Parenting, PBB
25
I get occasional email questions about the nonreligious parenting seminar tour. It’s usually a request to bring it to a particular city, but once in awhile someone wants to know (as one gent put it) my “algorithm for selecting locations.”
Okay. I hesitate to give away too much to the competition, but here it is:
…where x=population divided by number of churches and A= “cheese.”
For some reason, the answer is always “Wisconsin.”
An apparent grass-roots effort in Austin, Texas now has me reconsidering this time-honored approach.
There’s a form on my Seminars page inviting folks to submit the name of their city or town to have it considered for the seminar tour itinerary. If I get a dozen inquiries from a given city, that’s a good indication that interest is high enough to consider an event there. I’ve received hundreds of inquiries from over thirty-five cities in the U.S., three in Canada, and one in The Netherlands.
I gave a talk in Austin in May, but not the seminar. Then three days ago, a request came in from Austin via that online form. And another. And another. In one two-hour period, I received fifteen messages. By last night I’d received thirty-two requests to bring the seminar to Austin. Woohoo!
Austin has now leapt to the tippy-top of the waiting list.
If you’re hoping to bring the seminar your way, you might consider the Austin technique. Each seminar takes an enormous investment of time and effort. Knowing that there’s an audience chomping at the bit makes it well worth it.
Click here for the Add Your City page, or here for the general description of the seminar. Get a gaggle of friends to do the same and believe me, you’ll get my attention. Austin sure did. Yeah, baby!
_____________________________
IN OTHER NEWS…
A new category has opened up in the Parenting Beyond Belief Discussion Forum: POLITICS 2008! It’s a place to vent, exult, cathart, convince, discuss, or commiserate about this election season with other nonreligious parents. Local, state, or national. Any perspective welcome. No worries about relevance — this affects EVERYTHING else, so have at it!
Harvard honors the Sarah Palin of humanism
- September 09, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Parenting, PBB
- 36
It’s always interesting when someone unexpectedly breaks from the backfield and grabs a high-profile plum from more worthy contenders. Dan Quayle, Harriet Miers, and Clarence Thomas leap to mind. Shakespeare in Love beating Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture, or Art Carney (!) beating Dustin Hoffmann, Jack Nicholson, and Al Pacino for Best Actor.
Sarah Palin recently joined the ranks of those unexpectedly thrust to the front of the line, to be met with a collective shout of “WHO??”
Now Harvard has given us another one.
Among many other fine programs and services, the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard University selects one person each year as Harvard Humanist of the Year — someone who has made a significant contribution to the promotion and understanding of humanism. The list of past recipients is impressive, including
Sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, author of Consilience, The Ants, and On Human Nature, winner of two Pulitzers, the Crafoord Prize, and the National Medal of Science;
Courageous Bengali human rights activist and feminist Taslima Nasreen, poet and essayist, winner of the Sakharov Prize and multiple international human rights awards;
UN Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, a Canadian senator and humanitarian best-known for his attempts to halt the Rwandan genocide in 1993-94;
Rice University’s Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities Anthony Pinn, author and Humanist liberation theologian;
Representative Pete Stark, the first openly-nontheistic member of the U.S. Congress.
This year, the good folks at Harvard chose someone so obscure that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. Just think of that. Even Numa Numa Guy has a Wikipedia page.
Click here to see this year’s choice for Harvard Humanist of the Year.
happy birthday, big blue
One year ago today, Parenting Beyond Belief was born. The doctors were a bit worried at first — she was mostly blue, for one thing — but her spine was straight and she had two hands. Different sizes, sure, but two.
PBB opened on Amazon at 3300, the top one-tenth of one percent. A book that opens around 3000 typically settles contentedly into the 30-40,000 range after 6-8 weeks. Though the rank has gone up and down, it has been remarkably steady in the long haul, averaging around 3600 out of 4.5 million. Last night I checked the rank: 3302. So the audience continues to find the book, which is lovely.
This site now averages 1400 visitors a day, including a secular parents discussion forum, this blog, a page of resources for nonreligious parents, and the seminars. And the manuscript for a follow-up titled Raising Freethinkers: A Practical Guide for Parenting Beyond Belief is due to the publisher in five weeks and should be released around December.
the seminars
I am not a people-person. Folks always tell me they’re shocked to learn this. I suppose I do navigate PeopleWorld fairly well when necessary, but it doesn’t come naturally. I’d always rather be with a few familiar old shoes than a crowd of any kind. Parties suck the energy out of me, even as they make a bass-drumming bunny out of my wife. I disappear once or twice during any given party — simply decamp to the bathroom to splash water on my face and not chat for a few minutes. I’m not proud of this social ineptitude, but there it is.
Hiking alone for five days straight, on the other hand, or working alone in my home office every day, seeing only humans with whom I share DNA (in one way or another) for days on end, even weeks? Bliss.
So saying a seminar tour is more than a tad out of my comfort zone is…well…accurate. But we all have to move out of our comfort zones, or so I’ve heard.
Which is why I am surprised and even a bit pleased to discover, with six cities down and hopefully 30 to go, what it is that I look forward to as I leave for each trip.
It’s the people and their stories.
I am endlessly fascinated and moved by the human stories I’ve been hearing on the road. I simply can’t get enough of them. The mother of a newborn who is wrestling with her mother-in-law over baptism. The couple who recently found their way out of fundamentalism together and were immediately cut off (along with their daughters) from the rest of their family. The mother who pulled her daughter out of a religiously-saturated public school in the South to homeschool her — only to find the local homeschooling group required a pledge to follow “Christ-centered curricula” and to never teach evolution. The father whose ex-wife has converted to conservative Islam and now seeks full custody of their daughter — and appears close to getting it.
Then there are the adult nonreligious children of nonreligious parents, who wonder what the big deal is, as well as couples from families that are both religious and entirely open.
I’ve met people with deep scars and deeper resentments from having the fear of Hell drummed into them as kids, as well as the parents of a seven-year-old currently being terrorized to tears with that grotesque idea by his playmates.
Those most wounded by religion in the past often have the hardest time hearing that their kids need to be religiously literate. They want to keep the damn stuff as far from their kids as possible. I try to make the case that this is a recipe for producing a teen fundie — an attention-getting claim if ever there was. (I’ll make that case in an upcoming blog.)
One gentleman argued that we must say the word “evidence” as often as possible to our kids, suggests calling the winter holiday “Chrismyth,” etc, to drill home the difference in the religious and nonreligious approaches to knowledge. I’m not a big driller-homer, myself. I like to achieve the same things more subtly. But we all have to find our level.
I met a young woman for whom the section on helping kids deal with death had a special intensity: her husband, the father of their kids, has been diagnosed with brain cancer. I’ve been haunted by the thought of her and her kids nearly every day since we met. It completely breaks my heart, in no small part because my own dad died when I was young. I saw my own mom, widowed at 39, in that woman, and myself in her son.
A lesbian couple is currently working on pregnancy, even as they worry about coming out as nonbelievers to the evangelical parents of one of the women — something they want to get out of the way before a child arrives. “I love them dearly,” she said, “and they’ve just come around to accepting that I’m gay, and we’re talking again. Now I’m going hit them with this?”
I spoke at length with the parents of an impressionable seven-year-old (what other kind is there?) who has been invited, repeatedly, to join his friends at a Wednesday night bible study. The hitch? No parents allowed. One wonders why.
The seminar ends with suggestions for helping kids think about death. A child who becomes obsessively fearful of the idea of her own death is often stuck in a false concept of oblivion — what I call “me-floating-in-darkness-forever.” I offer a few specific ways to reframe this. After one seminar, a man approached and shook my hand.
“That thing about ‘me-floating-in-darkness’? I’ve always been terrified of death because that’s the way I’ve always seen it! I never even realized I was seeing it that way until you said that. I’m walking out of here today less afraid of death. That alone was worth the price of admission!”
All that after six cities.
The trick, as you might imagine, is coming up with a seminar that serves all those different needs, and what a trick it is. Any given issue has a wide range of significance to the audience. Take extended religious family. For some, this is a non-issue: the family is secular, the family is religious but open, or the family is 2000 miles away. For others, it is THE ISSUE.
Up next: Dallas/Fort Worth. I can’t wait to hear what y’all have to say.
