Here’s Bart’s interview with a renowned neuroscientist who has a fascinating personal journey and ended up caring deeply about things like the power of compassion and altruism. James Doty is the author of Into The Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart. On this episode of Humanize Me, James and Bart talk about:

• How loving and caring people who don’t believe in God are a challenge to some religious ideas
• How a guy that was such a preternatural and unexpected success lost it all
• What James learned that put a stop to the misery
• How the benefits of giving only work when it’s done with truly good motivations
• How much are we determined by our genes and how much can we choose our actions and motivations throughout our life?
• Why heaping shame on people for thoughts over which they have no control is an unhelpful exercise
• The capacity of humans to change their physiology mentally and how it’s a challenge to recognize the dark side of our humanity
• Kindness and tribalism
• How our brain is like a flip phone in an iPhone world, and needs help
• An existential disagreement over whether society will collapse from lack of sustainability or whether optimism is more justified
• Does the future of humanity matter, and how?

Enjoy! Get in touch with Bart! Grab a copy of James’s book HERE.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

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What do you do when you’re in a Christian marriage, you’re deep in church life, and secretly you don’t believe in God? Is it worth blowing up your whole life to try to be authentic with people about your lack of belief? Bart has some experience with a not-entirely-unsimilar situation to this listener, who wrote to him about it.

In this episode, Bart reads the email (starting at 7:50) and shares his thoughts about it. The broad strokes include:

• How change is the only constant in long-term relationships
• The oneness created by shared values and ideas, and what happens when those values become mismatched
• The cost of authenticity and of coming out of the closet
• How the theory of 10,000 hours of mastery may apply to faith and doubt
• How the way you ‘come out’ may be just as important as whether you do
• Humanist communities are going to be full of people like this guy, and how the secular community needs to respond

If this subject resonates with you, let Bart know by getting in touch HERE.

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This week’s episode of Humanize Me comes late after Bart was swept away over Mother’s Day with a visiting mom-in-law. The episode prompts a brief lesson in forgiveness when Bart realizes the inherent value of asking for, and offering, forgiveness for wrongs. (Bonus tip: it helps us bond as humans, and derives directly from our morality.)

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It sounds like an oxymoron, right? But Ann Neumann’s amazing book attempts to address the question of what a ‘good’ death may look like, and it stems right from her own experiences. It’s an American story, and a rich one, and it’s totally relevant to the mission Bart Campolo has to cultivate the best life – including its ending – that we can figure out how to live.

Here are some of the subjects that come up in this episode:

• How our end of life culture and systems are in need of a serious rethink
• What Ann’s takeaways about death are, after spending time with the dying
• What comforts people who are afraid of death?
• Why people often finally die when their loved ones step away from them
• The role of religion
• Can psychedelics help us gain perspective about death?
• Ann’s take on running toward what scares you

Ann’s book can be found HERE.

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Instead of interviewing guests, talking about secular goodness or counseling people through decision-making, this short episode of the Humanize Me podcast finds Bart sitting in a rental car in Cincinnati early this morning – April 11th, 2016 – contemplating his own finitude, and feeling the pain of being a mere visitor in a community that used to be his home.

Listen to the episode. Can you identify? Have you made a difficult move? Is there a value in feeling your way through pain instead of distracting yourself from it? How do you choose to traverse the valleys in your life? Let Bart know by getting in touch HERE.

LISTEN HERE