Dear Members and Friends,

We are holding our Summer Solstice Luncheon on Sunday afternoon, June 28, at the Royal East Restaurant, 782 Main St., Cambridge at one o'clock. And you are invited - of course!

The ambience and the food are wonderful, friendliness abounds. This year we will be celebrating for a special reason. Our national organization, the American Humanist Association, has designated us as "Chapter of the Year," an honor bestowed earlier this month in Phoenix, AZ at the Annual Conference of the AHA.. We received great praise (for just being who we are), a framed citation, and a check for $500. It was fun.

One very happy effect of that occasion was the willingness, the eagerness, of the AHA president to speak at the June Luncheon. He is our own David Niose, a husband/father and lawyer/writer in the Fitchburg area, and a member of our board of directors. He heads the AHA at an eventful time for Humanism, when its ranks are expanding, its programs multiplying,  and the media focussing on our secular causes, such as separations of church and state, civil rights and gay rights, educational reform, health care and world peace. What is he seeing from his advantaged heights in Washington, DC and how does he size up the Obama administration?  He'll tell us at our summer luncheon.

Our president, Dr. Joe Gerstein, and the Board join me in wishing you a healthy and relaxing summer,

Tom Ferrick

Update 1:  While you are thinking about it, please reply by email or call in your reservation today, (617--547-1497) -- that's necessary. Deadline to reserve: the last Friday of June. Plan on paying $21.00 per person, by cash or check, when you arrive at the restaurant, (or ahead of time by mail). 

Update 2: Directions to the restaurant’s Parking Lot:  In Cambridge’s Central Square area, turn from Massachusetts Avenue onto Main Street.  After passing by the Royal East on your right, take the next right, Windsor Street, and turn into the first parking lot on your LEFT, repeat, LEFT). 

Update 3:  Members of the Board of Directors will meet at the Royal East at 11:45 AM.

Humanism has long been concerned about freedom and self-management for all of us when death draws near. Doctors, hospitals and relatives must be aware of our desires. Let’s learn to take charge.

The "End of Life" video, funded by former HAM member Lisa Kuhmerker when she became aware that she had a fatal brain tumor, and subsequently supported by her Gifts of Time Foundation was produced by the Tufts Healthcare Institute. It features 3 separate vignettes illustrating various aspects of interplay between physicians and patients/families in difficult scenarios. Each vignette is followed by a group discussion moderated by John Paris, Professor of Bioethics at Boston College. The dicussion group consists of physicians of various specialties, patients/families in precarious situations, social workers and clerics. The product design envisions an ensuing group discussion among the viewers.

This video has been shown to physicians and lay people around the world (including the Asia-Pacific Conference on Chronic Lung Diseases and Sloan-Kettering Institute and has proved a very provocative and useful tool for helping professionals and laypeople to gain insight and empathy for these types of difficult social, political, religious and ethical situations. 

The group discussion will be moderated by Dr. Joe Gerstein, who helped in the production of the video and has presented it and led discussions in many other venues.

Our program for SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 15 will be a talk by Dr, Jerome Kassirer, author of On the Take: Medicine’s Complicity with Big Business Can Harm Your Health [ Google Books ]. He will examine the current issues of the intrusion of economics into medicine. Dr. Kassirer is presently the Distinguished Professor of Medicine at Tufts University Medical School and Visiting Professor at Stanford School of Medicine; he lives in Boston. He was the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine from 1991-1999. Last May he received the Humanist of the Year Award from the Ethical Society of Boston. He reported how drug companies have corrupted doctors by paying them to serve on research committees thus biasing their findings for personal gain.

Here is an example of the favorable reviews:

“His book is a call to the physicians today to resist the insidious effects of subtle and not-so-subtle conflicts of interest in accepting funding from the pharmaceutical industry. Scores of examples are documented of greed, venality, laziness and ignorance which have led physicians and professional organizations to compromise their integrity in the quest for financial support…..The book is a must-read for physicians of conscience and a warning to consumers to be careful where they place their trust.” Charles I. Campbell, former executive in the American Heart Association of New York.

Dr. Kassirer will speak at 1:30 pm Feb. 15. Free parking is available in the Littauer Lot adjacent to the Science Center, (enter at the Dworkin Building on Oxford.) The location of this event is new for us, the Yenching Institute’s Auditorium, 2 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge [ Google Maps ]. To orient you, think of the Oxford St. entrance of the Science Center, where Kirkland St. begins. Walk one block on Kirkland and the first street on your left is Divinity Ave., immediately after the traffic light. Turn onto Divinity and the Yenching Library is the first building on your right. Call the editor for more information, (617) 547-1497.

UPDATE: Permission has been given to use the Yenching parking lot through the afternoon. The lot is located right there behind the Institute.

First, Harvard's Janet Browne, Aramont Professor of the History of Science, will explore Charles Darwin’s cultural significance and what he has come to represent over time: the idea of scientific progress. Free and open to the public in the Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street. Time 6 PM.

Second, at Harvard’s Memorial Hall, aside the Science Center, there will be an evening party with Chaplain Greg Epstein as your host. There’s a great deal more on the Harvard campus. Click on “Events”
here : Darwin Day 200 at Harvard .

And, third, note that many humanists are expected to be attending an event at Framingham State College on February 12 at 7 p.m. to hear author and philosopher Daniel Dennett give a Darwin Day lecture there. It's hoped that members of both the Boston and Worcester AHA chapters will have a chance to meet one another and enjoy a snack or drink afterwards. All are welcome, admission is $5.00 (paid to the college when you get there - no reservations needed), so please show up and join us if you can

Dear Members and Friends of HAM,

We are going back to tradition this year and will celebrate the Winter Solstice on the day itself -- Sunday, December 21. The Light returns! Would you be kind enough to register by telephone between now and Friday, the 19th. Just call our number, (617) 547-1497 to make your reservation. Plan on paying the $21 at the door, (checks payable to the Humanist Association of Massachusetts). We suggest you arrive at 12:30 p.m. expecting to dine at 1:00 p.m.

Our friends at the Royal East Restaurant, 782 Main Street, Cambridge, provide a generous feast as well as free parking nearby. If you are driving down Main St. from Mass Ave, turn right onto Windsor and go one block, turning into the first parking lot on your left. (Follow these directions carefully). Please let us know if you have special dietary needs that the restaurant will meet.

At meal's end, we'll have a "round table" discussion, led by President Joe Gerstein, on the variety of ways Humanists and Freethinkers handle the "Holy Season." How do we get through it? Do you totally submit, or just go with the flow, or grumble "Humbug"? Do you seek out fellow Druids or volunteer at a soup kitchen? We'll have some fun with the question . . .

Ronald Aronson has a mission: to demonstrate that a life without religion can be coherent, moral, and committed. Optimistic and stirring, Living Without God is less interested in attacking religion than in developing a positive philosophy for atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, skeptics, and freethinkers. Aronson proposes contemporary answers to Immanuel Kant’s three great questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope? Grounded in the sense that we are deeply dependent and interconnected beings who are rooted in the universe, nature, history, society, and the global economy, Living Without God explores the experience and issues of 21st-century secularists, especially in America. Reflecting on such perplexing questions as why we are grateful for life’s gifts, who or what is responsible for inequalities, and how to live in the face of aging and dying, Living Without God is also refreshingly topical, touching on such subjects as contemporary terrorism, the war in Iraq, affirmative action, and the remarkable rise of Barack Obama.

“Obama has managed to generate a new sense of possibility by reminding a new generation that they are not just separate individuals but social beings. This has been his truly radical accomplishment: to awaken the slumbering social side of millions, especially among the younger generation.”(p. 198)

We Humanists are great admirers of “our founding fathers” especially those who were imbued by the Enlightenment with its rationality and its scientific bent. The Puritans, theocratic, and rigidly biblical, don’t measure up. And when it comes to that generation dealing so blindly and cruelly with witchcraft and summary executions, we have no tolerance whatsoever. Eve Laplante may change some minds.

This program takes place on Sunday afternoon, October 26, also in Phillips Brooks House, Harvard Yard at 1:30. Eve Laplante’s book, published just last year by Harper One, is her second personal historical study; she is the author of American Jezebel, her 12th generation ancestor, Anne Hutchinson. Samuel Sewall is her sixth great-grandfather, a man, says the Philadelphia Inquirer, “ whose second act became one of atonement as well as contrition -- an affectionate and affecting portrait.”

Eve Laplante gives us this amazing summary :

“In 1692 Samuel Sewall, a forty-year-old father of five, sat on the colonial court that tried hundreds of people accused of witchcraft. Believing the girls who claimed their neighbors bewitched them, Sewall convicted and condemned to death more than thirty women and men, including two of his friends. He and the court executed twenty people before public opinion turned and the governor halted the proceedings. Sewall struggled internally for years before publicly assuming "the blame and shame" for the wrongful convictions and deaths. He went on to compose America’s first antislavery tract and a revolutionary essay portraying Native Americans as virtuous inheritors of God’s grace. In a period when women were considered inferior to men, Sewall publicly affirmed the fundamental equality of the sexes. Through his long repentance Sewall became America’s most surprising moral hero.

On October 26 let’s plan to meet this Puritan. Maybe we will want to measure him differently… maybe.

Katrina Scott, a Humanist, and Board Member of the Boston Ethical Society, will speak in Phillips Brooks House, Harvard Yard, on Sunday, September 21, 2008, at 1:30 PM. Four years ago she discovered the work that fulfills her life – she is the Oncology chaplain at Massachusetts General. A long time friend of the Humanist Association she was among the three finalists when the Humanist Chaplain’s position at Harvard opened up. Gradually, we have grown comfortable with the idea of Humanist university chaplains but how about hospital Humanist chaplains? Well, Katrina Scott forcefully answers that question.

She describes her pastoral care based “on a holistic approach to healing that acknowledges and respects the heart/mind relationship. I define spirit (naturally) as the vital force characterizing a person as being alive, our sense of self. The spiritual aspect of wellness includes personal beliefs, behavior principles, and methods to achieve peace of mind between our interior being and exterior influences. Within her own religious tradition (Ethical Culture), members are guided by a simple principle; by treating each person so as to bring out the best in her or him, we also work toward bringing out the best in ourselves.” She quotes Abraham Maslow and his humanistic stance on religious experience: “I want to demonstrate that spiritual values have naturalistic meaning, that they are not the exclusive possession of organized churches, that they do not need supernatural concepts to validate them, that they are well within the jurisdiction of a suitably enlarged science, and that therefore, they are the general responsibility of all mankind.” She will show us how this view fits into the traditionally theistic world of hospital chaplaincy, where “all good chaplains share the same values and goals; they want to walk with people through their suffering, to accompany them during a short blip in their life journey that is also possibly the worst, or the best, time. For me the last four years have been a formative period in my life, especially in my development as a chaplain whose personal religion is humanistic.”

She continues, “The more I reflect the more sure I am that my ability to be human is my strength. To accompany an injured person, to sit with a grieving spouse, to hold a son’s hand, to listen and hear their stories are gifts which have strengthened my ability to meet the patient where she or he is, to facilitate their search for meaning in times of trauma and loss.” We will want to ask her on September 21 how humanist values can be employed in caring for the ill, without resorting to prayer, to revelation, to an afterlife. How does she get along with the other chaplains and with the hospital administrators? And for the dying, is there comfort in a brave stoicism ? Plan on voicing your questions.

HAM Members & Friends:

Our annual HAM Picnic and Gabfest is approaching:

Saturday, August 16, 2008; 1:00pm

THE GERSTEINS
400 HIGHLAND ST., WESTON, MA
(781) 891-8667 or (339) 927-1020

See full entry for travel instructions.

We guarantee great weather, based on past experience. If wrong, we’ll retreat inside and still have fun. We’ll have the usual beef, turkey and vegetarian burgers, regular and fat-free hot dogs, and fruit and sherbet desert. Please contact Tom prior to the 16th to register (by using his new gmail address above or call 617—547-1497) and plan to bring an appetizer, salad, fruit, or whatever. Please, if you are driving, bring an aluminum chair. We’ll have frigid alcohol-free beer & soft drinks available.

If you arrive early, please pull deep into the driveway behind the house so there will be room for everyone. If you need transportation, let Tom know if you need a pick-up at Riverside MBTA Station or at Kendall (Weston) Station on the North Station-Fitchburg Line.

See full entry for driving directions.

Tom suggests, for the PROGRAM, that we answer the question, “What Do I Believe?” It’s a picnic, now, so let’s not get too heavy. But we can imagine the question coming up at a school reunion. What words would you choose? Michael Shermer, editor of The Skeptic, answered the question his own way, as a person versed in science. Imagine your own answer. Read the rest of this entry.