A weekly podcast about building great relationships, cultivating wonder, and making things better for other people. Hosted by veteran community-builder Bart Campolo, Humanize Me features friendly, thoughtful conversations with a wide array of scientists, activists, artists and oddballs.
Have a question you’d like us to answer on a future episode? Call the Humanize Me ‘Q Line’ at .
An simple index of episodes can be found here.
Humanize Me is a production of Jux Media.
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 for Bart Campolo:
“Is there actually an unselfish act? And if there isn’t, are we doing it for the right reasons? Can there even be an unselfish act and if there is, would that be good?”
Takeaways: The feeling of reward for good deeds is grounded in evolution, the idea that only truly selfless acts are pure or good is probably a holdover from faith-based ethics, virtue is its own reward, take pride in and enjoy being a good person, how you act is what makes the difference in the world, self-interest – properly understood – actually mandates altruism, and excessive selfishness in the name of pursuing happiness is misinformed.
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 about it – Learning to Speak God from Scratch – which he and Bart Campolo chat about in this episode.
They talk about the resurgence of the religious right and the desire of many Christians to separate themselves from it, the importance of language to describe good and kind forms of spirituality, Jonathan’s own beliefs, the importance of good questions and our comfort level talking about our spiritual lives.
Jonathan is one of America’s premier religion writers whose work can be found at The Atlantic, The New York Times and many other publications, and whose website can be found at JonathanMerritt.com. His recent article about his latest book can be found HERE. His 2014 article about Bart’s ‘coming out’ to his parents as a humanist can be found HERE.
Leave us a review in iTunes! Take a screenshot of your review and send it to to enter our drawing for a copy of Jonathan’s book! The publisher has agreed to part with three of them, and we had 18 entries last time, so you stand a good chance of winning! Entries accepted until 11:59pm EST on Sunday, December 2nd.
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, podcast producer John Wright asks this question of Bart Campolo in this episode:
“Bill Maher thinks we should stop talking politics with each other in the context of our personal lives and let it be more of a private thing. As someone who had a very serious conversation over Thanksgiving with your parents several years ago about leaving the faith, what do you think of this idea, and how should we conduct conversations with family and friends over Thanksgiving and the holidays? Do you have any advice about topics which are good for these kinds of occasions and topics which are not?”
Takeaways: Set a goal beyond just hanging out, plan for different kinds of conversations, ask questions that allow others to be heard and seen, don’t try to change anybody’s mind, if you’re worried about having a difficult time tell someone you trust who can be rooting for you going in, have some good, safe topics on hand, and maybe break out the movie Elf.
Never heard Bart’s story of ‘coming out’ as an unbeliever to his parents on Thanksgiving? Watch the documentary (which has new pricing and rental options)! For info: CampoloFilm.com. Good reading material on the topic can be found in the recent NYT article, ‘How to Talk to People, According to Terry Gross.’
Also: Congrats to JC Murphy, Ben Ernsberger and Lexi Powers, who’ll each be sent a copy of Jessica Wilbanks‘ book, ‘When I Spoke in Tongues’, after winning our contest last week!
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.
In this conversation with Bart Campolo, Jessica talks about growing up in her family, the “loss of an assumptive world” with her loss of faith, having a nervous breakdown in college, transcendent experiences and the Holy Spirit, the early days of Pentecostalism, her mother defending her from an angry pastor, her bisexuality and more.
We’re giving away 3 copies of Jessica’s book! Just leave a public review of this podcast on iTunes (link here), take a screenshot of your review and then send it to . Good luck!
Jessica’s website is JessicaWilbanks.com.
Sometimes, in the face of big problems in the world, doing everything we can do feels inadequate.
Consider this episode’s question, asked by Lexi in the Humanize Me Facebook Group:
“Today I find myself missing prayer. I just finished watching Last Week Tonight and it was about family separation. They played a clip of a child recently reunited with his mother and he was crying and saying she didn’t love him. It was absolutely heart wrenching. My helplessness weighs heavy on me tonight. I can give money and protest and vote but my it feels small. I used to spend moments like these in prayer and I would leave feeling as though I had somehow actually done something. It was a way for me to feel like I could shut the door on that grief and move through life like normal. But as I’m typing this I think that maybe that was my problem. I shouldn’t move on from this grief. I should feel it fully and find more actionable steps to prompt change.”
Bart Campolo begins a multi-faceted answer, but partway through begins to doubt his own wisdom on this. After some reassurance, we see it through to the conclusion: we should do whatever we can, and give ourselves a break about what we can’t.
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 – psilocybin, LSD, DMT and others – is special. They provide strange, unusual forms of consciousness, changing the perspectives of those who take them so much that their experiences can be life-changing.
Bart Campolo has never tried psychedelics. But in his project to become more empathetic, more available to love others fully, and to make the most of the one life he has, he has become more and more certain that he can’t afford to avoid psychedelics forever. His conversation with Ashley includes: special usefulness for those with PTSD, anxiety and depression; Ashley’s own experiences; how to interpret the experiences and what they may tell us about reality; how to find a good guide; what scares Bart the most; and how we learn impactful things regardless of whether it’s a fun process or not.
Ashley Booth is a scientist, researcher and psychonaut. Her website can be found at AshleyBooth.net and her advocacy community can be found at AwareProject.org. Their guide for would-be participants (mentioned in this episode) can be found at AwareProject.com/Questions. Another of her endeavors can be found at InnerSpaceIntegration.com.
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