Humanize Me

Where was Bart last week, why didn't he answer anyone's emails or calls, and why didn't we release a new episode of the podcast? That's what producer John Wright demands to know at the start of this week's Q&A episode. In response, Bart lets us in on a week of private grief, and some of the thoughts that accompany it. We finish the episode with a 10-minute guided meditation / thought exercise...

A listener question prompts Bart Campolo to give some advice about how to open up good conversations with your children about sex and relationships. Our listener is the mother of a 12 year-old girl, who, it is discovered, is interested in a boy at school. The girl's father is panicking and concerned while the mother simply wants to ask how to keep her daughter out of trouble.

Sex expert and therapist Dr. Marty Klein has a lot to say about pornography. In this conversation with Bart Campolo, Marty talks about porn and relationships, how people are ultimately responsible for the narrative they're telling themselves, the importance of novelty in human sexuality, the 'contracts' people have in relationships, how people respond to the aging process, and how to take the firs...

A listener named Benjamin calls to ask why Bart feels the need to 'reinvent the wheel' with secular community-building, rather than simply join a Unitarian Universalist congregation. Benjamin says that he himself has found what he's looking for at a UU church. Bart responds to Ben's question, saying that he loves the UU movement but it didn’t feel like a fit for him personally. Bart goes on to tal...

Gretta Vosper is an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada who, as a self-professed atheist, has survived an official review from her denomination and continues to serve as the pastor of her congregation. In this conversation, Bart Campolo talks with Gretta about the story of the last few years, why she stays in her church, what her congregation believes about a supernatural God (Gretta...

In episode 407, Bart and John attempted to answer the question of a 15 year-old listener who wondered aloud why people aren't freaking out more, and doing more, about climate change. In the wake of that episode, Bart heard from many other listeners who didn't think we nailed it. So, this is our attempt at a redo! Let us know what you think.

Bart Campolo is a materialist, which means that he thinks that the physical universe and its movements are the basis of all reality, and that human consciousness, morality, meaning and everything else comes from physical nature. So you may consider it odd that Bart would have Mark Gober on his podcast, whose book argues that science has proven the existence of consciousness beyond the human body....

The earth is in trouble and nobody seems to care. That's the observation of Josie, 15, who called the podcast after hearing more and more about humanity's biggest challenges during science class.

Is it even a word? Bart Campolo’s reaction to the anti-semitic shooting in Pittsburg was to reach out to his Jewish friends and ask how they were doing. It made him wonder if there is a way to be actively pro-semitic, and to support Jews more. To answer this, Bart reached out to the hosts of the most popular Jewish podcast in existence, Unorthodox. Mark Oppenheimer, Stephanie Butnick and Liel Leib...

A letter this week from a listener who says he's hungry for community with like-minded secular people is just the latest one like it. But this one couldn't have come at a better time, or landed on more fertile soil. Two Sundays ago, Bart Campolo and a team of like-minded people held their first content-driven gathering at his new house in Cincinnati. The theme of the event was, 'Paying Attention.'...

You can be forgiven for not being familiar with 'pyrotheology', the lifelong philosophy project of Peter Rollins. In this episode of Humanize Me, Bart Campolo attempts a philosophical deep dive with Pete, a friend of the podcast for years. It’s a very lively, argumentative conversation on the differences between Bart and Pete on human drive and desire, humanism, religion, death, meaning and meanin...

One of our listeners read an interview with Conan O'Brien in the New York Times last week, wherein Conan embraces the idea of his own coming irrelevance, and that of his work. Our listener finds it both 'liberating and depressing,' and Bart Campolo has lots to say about this, attempting to give an answer.

James Croft is the Outreach Director of the Ethical Society of St. Louis, a longstanding humanist congregation, and one of the largest in the world. In this conversation with Bart Campolo, James talks about what his congregation is doing to engage with the issues of St. Louis, a place which has made many headlines in the past number of years for racial strife. James subscribes to 'deed before cree...

It's a new year! A time for fresh ideas and new beginnings, and so much has been happening in Bart Campolo's life that this episode serves as an update and a reflection on various themes, including: how helping a parent cross life's finish line can focus the mind and change your plans, how the birth of a first grandchild a few days later can turn the whole thing into a 'circle of life' motif, whil...

A quick Christmas greeting from Bart Campolo, urging secular folks like himself to embrace the holiday for what it is, and be their best humanist selves during the season.

Bart Campolo's oldest and closest friend, Matthew Rodreick, is this week's guest on the podcast. Matthew's life has been shaped by his son Gabe's spinal cord injury, sustained around a decade ago when Gabe was 16.

Today's caller was in line at a drive-through coffee place, and decided to pay for the people behind her in line. But she realized that, in the course of doing so, the rewarding feeling she got from the act may have been the reason she did it in the first place. And that led to her question: 'Is there actually an unselfish act? And if there isn't, are we doing it for the right reasons? Can there e...

Language really shapes how we think about things. After Jonathan Merritt moved from the South to New York City, he discovered that the words he had always used to describe spiritual life didn’t resonate anymore! The more pluralistic and postmodern the society, he observed, the less language people seem to have for spiritual experience. Jonathan is so sure that this is a problem, he wrote a book ab...

Let's be honest: Spending time cooped up with family and friends on holidays like Thanksgiving can present some interesting conversational challenges for many of us. With that in mind, our question this week is about the idea of putting a moratorium on political chat over the holidays, and whether Bart - as someone who famously had a very serious ideological conversation with his parents on Thanks...

Jessica Wilbanks grew up in a fundamentalist Pentecostal church on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay, and then, at 16, walked away from the church. Ever since, she's been haunted by the world she left behind and wrote a book about it, just released: When I Spoke in Tongues (available on Amazon). In this conversation with Bart Campolo, Jessica talks about growing up in her family, the "loss o...

Sometimes, in the face of big problems in the world, doing everything we can reasonably do stills feels inadequate. Consider the question this week, which is about missing prayer, and the helplessness it can provoke. Bart begins a multi-faceted answer, but partway through begins to doubt his own wisdom on this. After some reassurance, he sees it through to the conclusion: we should do whatever we...

Just say no! That's the mantra most of us have picked up from authority figures in our lives about drugs of all sorts, no matter their category. But for our guest Ashley Booth and a growing number of scientists, doctors and thinkers, it's become clear that our culture threw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to the usefulness of psychedelics. This particular class of compounds - psilocy...

Some of the things people abandon when they leave the church are rituals. But this week's Q&A features a voicemail by listener Morris Bird, who asks: 'What are your thoughts generally on the role of rituals in secular communities, and what makes a good ritual, and how are good rituals designed and implemented into a community?'

Don't worry; if you've never heard of 'evidism', you're not alone. This is a term coined by the guests in this episode, inventor Jeff Haley and author Dale McGowan, to describe people committed to fact-based, evidence-based thinking. In this conversation with Bart Campolo, Haley and McGowan talk about their book, Sharing Reality: How to Bring Secularism and Science to an Evolving Religious World,...

How does one decide who to pick to be friends with? Bart Campolo and John Wright look at this question as a sort of 'Part 2' to the last Q&A about cultivating good friendships: 'I really enjoyed Episode 326 where you guys talked about how being interested in other people is the first step to having good friendships, but my question is, who should I be focusing on? Who should I invest in or try...