Looking for some wisdom and insight this holiday season? We went shopping in our archives and put together a gift collection of Leader Joe Chuman’s latest and greatest platform addresses, each one some meaty food for thought among the sugar cookies and eggnog. Please help yourself from the list below!
Also this month, our Society is celebrating with a festival, food, music, and reflection during three Humanist at the Holidays Sundays.
My Ethics are Not for Sale: Preserving the Human Spirit in a Market-Driven World: Examining the consequences of a world bent on turning everything and everyone into a commodity. February 2014
Simply Because It is the Right Thing to Do: If we mold our lives through practice, we can often reach the point where what we have to do is what we want to do. December 2012
The Little, Nameless, Unremembered Acts of Kindness and Love: Joe Chuman takes inspiration from the poet William Wordsworth, who wrote of “…little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love,” to explore the value of compassion, attention, and being present for one another. February 2019
Is It About Me or About Us? How Should I Direct My Life? To whom or to what are humanists accountable? None of the general responses is adequate on its own, but taken together they are compelling and help us to determine the place of the individual in society. June 2019
Must Humanism Be Reasonable? This talk is inspired by the late Ethical Culture leader Ies Spetter, who often said of Ethical Culture and of us: Our mission is to rescue the human from all those forces that seek to degrade it. March 2013
Einstein’s Religion: Einstein, a friend of Ethical Culture, believed that behind or within reality there exists an order that is rationally structured and is scrutable, partially, to the human mind. January 2019
Ethical Culture is not Atheism: Ethical Culture does not start with the issue of whether there is a God or no God, nor is that its primary preoccupation. Ethical Culture starts with and is built upon an abiding intuition about human beings and human relations at their deepest and most important level. September 2012
Loving Our Neighbor and the World: Cosmopolitanism and the American Future: With the deepening divisions in American society, politically, socially, and economically, perhaps the time has come to envision and to advocate for another way of understanding American society and American identity. March 2019
The Enduring Relevance of Ethical Culture: Our world is much different than when Felix Adler founded Ethical Culture in 1876. Yet, of all the “religions of humanity” created in the 19th century, it alone has survived into the 21st. Why Ethical Culture has endured. November 2019
The Farther Reaches of American Racism: How do we explain racism’s stubborn persistence in American life? January 2016
As a Humanist, Should I Seek to Escape This World? The great religions, despite their tremendous diversity, are all based on the assumption that the human condition is in some sense problematic. As humanists, we don’t need to seek invulnerability from life’s hardships. September 2019
Prudes and Libertines: Politics, Religion, and Polarization: As abortion and opposition to gay marriage became pivotal issues in the 1980s, religion became partisan as the Democratic and Republican parties became identified with one position or the other. April 2012
Is Respect for Culture Good for Women? What’s the answer when the individual rights of women’s equality clash with culturally derived values that undercut women’s equality? May 2014