In the backcountry Ozarks, where I come from, there are a lot of old stories about the years in the twentieth century when Ozark farmers…

Those who love order and tranquility don’t tend to be fans of democracy. After all, democracy, in its very essence, is loud and messy. Taking the time to listen to every voice in the room can be tedious, tiresome, boring . . . like reading a thesaurus too long. This…

As the leader of a Humanist community, I get a lot of questions about liturgy for secular folks. Here is my working document of writings…

Several philosophers have said it, but the truth is painful: The worship of a symbol is idolatry but . . . it’s symbol all the way down. That “it’s symbols all the way down” is and has always been the human condition as we have wrestled to understand and describe…

(Exploring I/Thou, I/It, and I & I) Philosopher Martin Buber’s famous distinction between the I/Thou and I/It relationships has long been a cornerstone of liberal theological thought. Briefly, Martin Buber postulated that we human beings enter into two sorts of relationships, I/It and I/Thou relationships. For Buber, the I/It relationship…

If the burned-over summer of 2023 has taught us anything, surely it is that we human beings need to start loving the earth more. Or else. As a Humanist, I blame the monotheisms for forging the destructive I/It thinking that is damaging the planet and threatening our species. However unfair…

People matter more than ideas. People have many ways of knowing, many ways of discovering and expressing what it means to be human. All ways matter. Art is universal. Science, mathematics, and scholarship are universal human expressions testable and provable in all human cultures. …

What is a Poetics? Poetics is perhaps a precious and academic-sounding word, but I think it well expresses the concept that we are creating our lives from moment to moment, and that it is possible to create an aesthetic life from moment to moment. As the philosopher Epictetus put it…

Let’s face it, in such questions as race, class, and gender, Emerson wrote some really mean and dumb things. Should he be cancelled? Well, to be factual, Emerson already cancelled himself. In his 1836 essay Nature — often credited with beginning the transcendentalist movement — Emerson wrote, Why should not…