Humanism and the Humanities
The urban clergy group that I am a member of in downtown Minneapolis includes rabbis, imams, Christian ministers of various sorts, and me, a Unitarian Universalist Humanist. As a group, we celebrate Thanksgiving each year. It has become a good-natured running joke that for this service “the Unitarian” will read a contemporary poem. “Because that’s, like, your scripture, right?”
Yes, as a matter of fact, it is. But so are the rest of the poetic, philosophical, and theological creations of the human species. It’s just that rabbis, imams, and Christian ministers cover a lot of the old stuff, so I attempt to share some of the more recent sacred texts.
I was a literature professor before I became a minister, after all, and I’m a poet as well. The use of language is one of the chief ways we human beings have created meaning and purpose over the millennia.
Sadly, we contemporary Humanists in European and post-colonial nations talk too little about the source of it all, the humanities. Yet it was that insistence on the beauty of the art of the past that ignited a passion for human dignity and human rights that we call the Renaissance. I call those ideas the chief contributions of the West to the larger human conversation.
The humanities celebrate thrilling human achievements in art and culture, while remembering all the while the etymology of the term: humus, “earth,” “soil.” We are earth animated.
As humanity faces climate change — an existential threat magnitudes greater than we have faced in millennia — it may be that our art and our song will be the greatest comfort and encouragement.
Perhaps scientific thought will yet save us from the disasters of our applied technologies, but whatever the human future holds, the animated soil that we are will need those precious words.
Because that’s, like, your scripture, right?
