Humanize Me

Bart chats with his friend, the actress Maggie Wheeler, who is a director of the Golden Bridge Community Choir in Los Angeles, where people join together at all levels of singing ability and form a harmonious whole. They explore how singing brings people together and how her choir is actually an exercise in community-building.

A special year-end edition of Humanize Me.

Bart chats with his old friend Mark Yaconelli about his latest project, The Hearth Community, gatherings in which people explore, craft, and share stories from what they have lived. They talk about how these gatherings compare to Christian church, how they're different, and what role such things can play in shaping a secular world.

What to do when you've made a mistake. After all, we're all human.

That's the name of Jim Gilliam's book, wherein he describes his journey out of fundamentalist faith, through serious illness and into internet-facilitated activism and a software company that helps leaders connect with their people. Bart chats at length with Jim at his offices in Los Angeles about connected humanity.

How does a secular humanist respond to the election by many of his fellow Americans of a brash, impulsive man who they know deep down doesn’t really care about them? Slowly. Thoughtfully. Bart Campolo reads aloud his careful thoughts on the election of Donald Trump, and advocates an approach which involves trying to understand those who voted for him and listening with compassion and curiosity.

Like Bart, Katherine Ozment is trying to figure out how best to find meaning, purpose and belonging in a secular age. In this conversation Bart asks her about her journey, which is similar to so many stories we've been hearing recently from the audience of Humanize Me.

Irshad Manji is an author, speaker and founder of the Moral Courage Project, espousing a ‘reformist' interpretation of Islam. She's featured in all kinds of media to speak out when others have wanted to shut her up, and chats with Bart here about a wide range of relevant and interesting subjects.

Last week's episode hit a nerve, or perhaps that should be many nerves. It's late at night in his apartment in Los Angeles and Bart takes a few minutes to touch upon the many responses to the episode with his wife Marty about whether he's being ‘too nice' about Christianity.

If it were up to Bart’s wife Marty, the rest of the world probably still wouldn’t know about their deconversion and this podcast wouldn’t exist, so her joining him for this episode is a pretty big deal. Rather than focusing on their marriage per se, however, Bart and Marty open up to each other about an immediate and excruciating question that every former believer must face sooner or later: How l...

Bart's friend Peter Montoya talks about his attempts to start a new community of secular ‘freethinkers' from the ground up, how he began with the idea of a real, physical intentional community and didn't get there, and ended up with a large online community to show for it instead.

Bart talks about the attempt to create a new humanist community, one that listeners of this podcast can be part of. What's the difference between having a group of friends and having a community?

Can documentary filmmaking tell us anything useful about how to live our lives? Are people worth listening to for their own sake? These questions and others came up during Bart’s chat with his friend John Wright, the Northern Irish filmmaker working on the documentary about Bart’s transition out of Christian faith, and his father’s response to it as a well-known Christian evangelist.

Bart reads a letter from a listener whose wife worked really hard over many months to get a coveted new job, only to have her mother attribute all her success to God instead. Bart responds.

Bart chats with Brian Kateman of the Reducetarian Foundation about his mission to help reduce our meat consumption by encouraging people to simply eat less meat. This new movement is composed of individuals who have committed to eating less red meat, poultry, and seafood, whatever the degree or the motivation.

How to initiate conversations with people about life after religious belief, even when you live in the Bible Belt.

Once in a while, we run into people who we have so much in common with, it’s an instant connection and leads to a long conversation. This is one such conversation, between two well-known progressive Christian ministers who both stopped believing in God in recent years and left Christianity in public ways. Although Bart Campolo and Jim Mulholland share many aspects of their stories with each o...

Your life is going to end someday. How do you live when you know life is finite? In this clip, Bart Campolo and Hemant Mehta talk about the moments of connection, awareness and sensation that make life worth living to its fullest.

A listener writes with a problem: she's an atheist but her husband is still a strongly committed Christian who is teaching their kids that, if they don't accept Christianity, they'll go to Hell. What does she do?

Shane Claiborne is a progressive Christian leader and author who is passionate about social justice, and an old friend of Bart's.

Roman Campolo, son of Bart, joins him for a conversation.

Bart tells the story of a recent experience being introduced to a trans student at the University of Southern California.

A conversation with comedian and performer Holly Laurent.

Bart reacts to a mass shooting in Orlando.

Dr. James Doty is a clinical professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University and founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, an affiliate of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute.