SECULAR VOLUNTEERS NEEDED NOW! RU AGAINST HUNGER

Register to participate.

Rutgers Against Hunger (RAH) and a new student group committed to working with RAH – studentorganizedrah@gmail.com (SO-RAH). need help with upcoming events (you can wear your group’s t-shirts):

  1. SO-RAH Hunger Games (4/11), providing food for young students WHO CAME FROM FOSTER CARE SYSTEM.
  2. ***Volunteers at Community Food Bank of NJ (4/13, 11:30am-1:30pm) – 10 SLOTS AVAILABLE! , Transportation to Hillside provided from campus
  3. NJ PIRG Hunger and Homelessness campaign. Collect food from households in New Brunswick and spread the word about hunger issues

Volunteers at Elijah’s Kitchen, New Bruns. (4/13) – NO MORE SLOTS AVAILABLE; next openings in June and after.

CONTACT RutgersHumanist [@] gmail.com for information.

~Barry Klassel

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APPLY: FOUNDATION BEYOND BELIEF, SUMMER INTERNS

Looking for a summer internship?

Want to make a difference in the world?

Foundation Beyond BeliefFoundation Beyond Belief is a non-profit devoted to “encouraging and demonstrating Humanist generosity and compassion.”  FBB does this by focusing on fundraising and sponsoring charities working in the areas of Education, Poverty and Health, Human Rights and the Natural World.

They also engage in inter-religious cooperation through their Challenge the Gap program that works with charities based in other worldviews.

 

From May 1 to August 31, 2013 Summer Interns will work online at home in the areas of:

  • Assisting the Foundation with membership development
  • Researching and selecting featured charities
  • Donor management
  • Outreach, communications (including blog and social media)
  • Program design
  • And creative organizational development

Click here to learn more about their Summer Interns Program.

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TRANSITIONING TO NEWSLETTER; & NEW APPLIED SENTIENCE

Humanist Issues, the Chaplaincy’s newsletter and blog (what you’re reading right now!) will continuing to go through a transition over the next few weeks and months.

Shark - I say!We have lots of exciting plans.  But what does this all mean for you?

Well Humanist Issues will be continuing to send out updates to our subscribers list.  However, we will be reserving this page for news and updates about the Humanist Chaplaincy at Rutgers as well as its events at Rutgers University.

We will be discontinuing the blog portion of Humanist Issues.  Instead we hope you subscribe and continue reading our affiliated blog Applied Sentience!  At AppSent the format will be significantly different.  Specifically, one of the main aims is to nurture more involvement from Faculty and Alumni.

Also, of worthy note, Applied Sentience is currently looking for Staff Writers to regularly contribute pieces to the blog.  We already have a few writers signed up, so make sure to apply soon!  We’re looking for qualified writers, both current undergraduates and graduate students as well as Rutgers alumni.

You can check out the AppSent website for more details.  And make sure to also check us out on Facebook!

Stay tuned for more updates!!

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‘APPLIED SENTIENCE’: A NEW BLOG BY THE RU HUMANIST COMMUNITY

The Rutgers Chaplaincy is planning on shifting the blog section of Humanist Issues to a new website.  Currently Humanist Issues acts as the Chaplaincy’s newsletter as well as a forum for articles and discussions on topics related to  Humanism.  From now on the Humanist Chaplaincy at Rutgers will maintain it’s own newsletter, but will discontinue it’s blog.

Instead we are announcing Applied Sentience, a new independent blog!

Plans for a new website and social media are already in the works.  We’re also looking for staff writers from Rutgers undergraduate, graduates and alumni.

In the coming weeks we’ll make sure to keep you up to date about the transition!

 

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BIG PLANS & AN INTRODUCTION

Rajesh Sannidhi

The Chaplancy’s blog Humanist Issues is planning some BIG CHANGES.  We’re hoping to develop more and better content, reach more readers and attract more involvement from Rutgers students and alum.

To help with this expansion, I would like to introduce and welcome Raj Gopal, the blog’s new Co-Editor in Chief!

Raj is a Rutgers Philosophy major who Continue reading →

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WARM UNIVERSE, COLD UNIVERSE: GRIEF, CONSOLATION & THE ATHEIST/RELIGIOUS DIVIDE

Barry Klassel
Humanist Chaplain at Rutgers University

It’s almost midnight.  Two friends in their twenties walk down the beach toward the water.  Behind them, the lights of the city glow in the distance.

Earlier in the day the two attended the funeral of a third friend.  His family seemed devastated, but one by one various speakers did their best to talk about the life of the deceased and his last days in pain as they tried to deal with the difficulty of accepting his death.

The two friends sit silently on the sand.   Continue reading →

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ATHEIST & GAY: DOUBLE JEOPARDY… OR OPPORTUNITY?

By David Madison
PhD., Biblical Studies

Two Weddings

David and David, 1992

The message on our placard was straightforward: “It’s Not Complicated: I Want to Marry the Man I Love. Case Closed.” My husband and I carried that sign for many years in the New York Gay Pride Parades—long before we had legal married status.

A few months after our 30th living-together anniversary, we were finally married in California in 2008. A few weeks later, voters passed the mean-spirited Proposition 8, which halted marriage equality in that state. A court subsequently ruled that the 18,000 same-sex marriages that had been performed were not nullified by the vote. We breathed an enormous sigh of relief. It had been a wonderful wedding on a riverboat in the Sacramento River, with our daughter Deb Sweeney co-officiating, a Continue reading →

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PATHFINDERS PROJECT: RESEARCH TRIP FOR HUMANIST SERVICE CORPS

By Conor Robinson
Director, Pathfinders Project

Are you interested in travel, service, Humanist leadership and community-building?

Then consider applying to Pathfinders Project, a yearlong international service trip with clean water, education, sustainability, and advocacy projects in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The trip is sponsored by Foundation Beyond Belief, a non-profit organization created to focus, encourage, and demonstrate the generosity and compassion of secular humanists.

Aims of the Program

Pathfinders Project has three primary aims

  • To provide humanitarian service and address specific regional needs in the respective countries visited,
  • To foster dialogue across religious, cultural, and ethnic boundaries, and
  • To evaluate and compare countries and partner organizations for consideration as the launch site of the Humanist Service Corps as an ongoing program of Foundation Beyond Belief. Continue reading →
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CNN, MSNBC, NPR, WHITE HOUSE & MORE: HUMANIST CHAPLAINCIES IN RECENT NEWS

The past few weeks have seen a huge increase in visibility of Humanist Chaplaincies, and Humanism in general.  Here’s some links to recent highlights:

  • In a recent post on the CNN Belief Blog, Greg Epstein, Humanist Chaplain at Harvard, was featured as a voice for building bridges and focusing on community during the holiday season; a counterpoint to more aggressive tactics in the atheist movement.
  • Boston’s NPR News Station Continue reading →
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RUTGERS HUMANIST CHAPLAINCY, THOUGHTS ON RECENT TRAGEDIES

By Barry Klassel
Humanist Chaplain at Rutgers University 

The school killings on December 14 in Newtown, Connecticut, brought representatives of various belief traditions together for a Memorial Service in a Somerset County (NJ) Gurdwara (Sikh Temple) a week later.

I went to express compassion for the survivors and to share some humanist thoughts.  The event was sponsored by the Somerset County Cultural Diversity Coalition.  The following is from a short few words I was able to offer while there.

The Human Community

Good evening.  I’m an atheist and a humanist.  You probably don’t have many people like me here with your group so thank you for inviting me to speak to you good people.

Joyful events bring good people together, like Continue reading →

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WHAT I GOT AWAY WITH ON MY WAY TO ATHEISM

By David Madison
PhD Biblical Studies, Boston University

It was about 1970, when I was studying for the ministry at Boston University School of Theology, that I wrote an essay entitled On the Improbability of God. Many years later I found out that Percy Bysshe Shelley had been expelled from Oxford in 1811 for writing his essay, The Necessity of Atheism. Well, 1970 wasn’t 1811, and I survived my blatant cheekiness. Since I never went to chapel while I attended seminary, I was considered the class eccentric, the contrarian seminarian.

I wasn’t kicked out, and I finally managed to write a statement of personal theology that was given the imprimatur by that liberal Methodist institution. I leaned heavily on the obtuse theology of Paul Tillich, who called God the Ground of All Being—and said that God didn’t exist because existence would be a limiting concept.

So I survived to Continue reading →

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A HUMANIST GRACE: THOUGHTS FOR THE HOLIDAYS

By Barry Klassel
Humanist Chaplain at Rutgers University

A couple of years ago I performed a humanist civil union ceremony in the beautiful formal gardens that adjoined a mansion on the campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University.  The elegant building was designed in the 1890s by famed architect Stanford White.  After the ceremony I enjoyed a bit of wine at the reception inside one of the fine halls and, as I was gathering my stuff to leave, the couple asked me if I would stay and say Grace for the meal that would follow.  

I knew I had been working on a version of a humanist Grace and I hurriedly tried to remember what I’d written Continue reading →

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DISCUSSION: IS CHRISTMAS CHRISTIAN OR SECULAR?

How do you celebrate Christmas?

There is a ton of debate, much of it facetious, about the War on Christmas.  It’s certainly become a staple of FOX News over the past few years.

However, I know a lot of Humanist, Atheists, Freethinkers and so on that celebrate it regularly.  And yet others like the Associate Editor of Free Inquiry Tom Flynn who argues in his book The Trouble with Christmas that non-Christians positively should not celebrate Christmas.

So what do you think?

-Should non-theists and humanists stop celebrating Christmas and replace it with our own holiday, like HumanLight?
-Or, Is Christmas already a secular holiday?

And if you celebrate Christmas still, what’s your advice for those hairy situations with religious family?  Do you go along or just try your best to ignore this and that about ‘virgin births’?

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CONGRATULATIONS: RUSH NOW AN OFFICIAL RUTGERS CLUB

Congratulations to the Rutgers University Secular Humanists!!

We’re proud of the accomplishments of the RUSH E-board and members who put together the constitution, members lists and other paper work and finally got provisional status as a actual club.

Cheers!  And here’s to finally getting a budget and the chance to meet in actual rooms for your meetings!

Everyone at HCRU looks forward all the great projects in your future.

If you’re interested in joining the now official club, please check out the Rutgers U. Secular Humanist’s Facebook Page.

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