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.
A recent blog post by Esther Perel caught Bart Campolo’s eye. In this brief, bonus episode, Bart reads his unauthorized edit of Perel’s piece, which is about what we’ve lost in the pandemic, and how to cultivate collective resilience and ‘tragic optimism’.
Perel’s original essay can be found HERE.
Mark Oppenheimer is a friend of this podcast who is a signatory to a recent open letter published by Harper’s Magazine, in praise of open debate and tolerance for differing opinions, and against some aspects of ‘cancel culture’, dogmatism and censoriousness.
In this conversation with Bart Campolo, Mark chats about why he signed the letter, the limits and boundaries of free speech, the likeliest paths to progress, the effects of added scrutiny on writers at present and some of the reasons he thinks liberals have gotten less ‘liberal’. It’s just Part 1, so stay tuned for a followup! This topic is part of our focus on better conversations.
Read the letter at:
https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
Read Ross Douthat’s 10 theses on cancel culture at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/cancel-culture-.html
“Hi Bart, I know in your podcast you talk a lot about people in ‘suddenly interfaith’ marriages, where one is a believer and the other has since left, and obviously there are obstacles, but what I want to know is: Does anything work? Is intimacy possible between people of radically different worldviews?”
Bart’s perspective: Sometimes. And there are some things that make it harder and other things that make it easier.
Leah Helbling is a close friend of Humanize Me and a member of the team at the humanist community Cincinnati Caravan with Bart Campolo.
In this episode, the two chat about Leah’s instinct to attempt to ‘deconvert’ those who are questioning their faith, and Bart’s belief that many people are better off staying where they are. The friendly disagreement started when Bart answered a question in Episode 504 from a listener called Craig who found himself in that position.
Along the way, the conversation addresses some of the harm done by religion, Leah’s sense of shame in her past as an evangelical woman, the kinds of Christianity available and how different they are from each other, how the length of time since deconversion can affect one’s approach, the merits or otherwise of ‘accommodating’ Christianity, the idea that there is one best way to live or to be, to meddle or not to meddle, the difference between meddling and listening, and in what circumstances someone can know what’s in somebody else’s best interests.
Listen to Leah’s own podcast, Women Beyond Faith, on Stitcher.
In this solo episode, Bart talks about seeing the current wave of protest and uprising – the most significant moment ever for the Black Lives Matter movement – in the context of collective trauma.
After talking a bit about insomnia, shaking hands with a local dog owner and dating in the pandemic, we turn to a voicemail asking Bart’s opinion of anti-natalism, the philosophical position that ascribes a negative value to having babies.
In response, Bart takes an approach which doesn’t attempt to engage too much with the rational arguments of anti-natalism, saying that we should have an anti-natalist on the podcast to talk to. Instead, we talk about the values of humanity being ‘baked in’, one of them being reproduction, and the fact that we tend to value contradicting things, leading to optimal ethics and situational ethics.
Support Humanize Me and get exclusive content on:
