What emerges when we center relationships, envision collectively, and leverage institutional resources in solidarity? #HumanistSpark
Several generations converged at the Kindling the Humanist Spark Summit, which took place August 2 – 5 at Tufts University. Under the coordination of Anthony Cruz Pantojas, Evan Clark, and Srishti Hukku, the retreat-style gathering was structured in ways that promoted co-generative envisioning, mutual consent, and healthy boundaries. The ethos of the summit aimed to model trust, vulnerability, and accountability as bonds between participants deepened.
This cohort from across the United States and Canada engaged in interdisciplinary theories, methodologies, and practices of humanism and freethinking, and their significance in everyday life. The plenary speaker was Greg Epstein, Humanist Chaplain at Harvard and MIT who spoke about the evolution of his own humanism, higher education chaplaincy, the important role mentorship played in his life and the need for young humanist leaders to impact their communities and the secular/humanist world for the better. He exhorted the cohort to understand the historical present, and continue working towards new frontiers of knowledge, technologies, and practices. Christian Luis Loyo, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Biology at MIT facilitated a workshop that espoused a commitment to scientific inquiry and the natural world.
Cruz Pantojas opened the first day with a workshop entitled The Practice of Being Human which examined possibilities of humanism that take seriously a commitment to capacious and emancipatory relationalities. The session also featured the “doing” of humanism across histories, geographies, and digital platforms. Participants were invited to explore a specific framework based on creolization which can be regarded as a dynamic unsettling of the cohesion of identity and culture towards the dynamic recognition of people’s influences and how experiences are interpellated in continuous processes that center the agency of subjectivities from the periphery and enlivened by these other perspectives of the inter-relational, embodied, and decolonial.
“As an Afro-Caribbean Humanist, the validation tuning to the senses as valid sites of knowledge and embodied experiences both from a local and global perspective is necessary. These aesthetic encounters enact a pedagogy of caring and witnessing that encourages alternative epistemes that thwart the delusions of colonial modernity’s machinations and outlook of progress,” Cruz Pantojas states. Through different thinking of the human condition, vulnerable and reparative readings of existential care were promoted. Cruz Pantojas continues, “We encouraged normalizing non-linear becomings, and a ‘rhizomatic orientation to life,’ where the witnessing of the multiplicity and the pluriversal create room for possibility.”
Evan Clark, who is also the Executive Director of Atheists United, shares, “The humanist movement will only ever be as strong as the leaders and communities we foster. This event proved the future of North American humanism is ready to build a more inclusive and impactful movement along the way.”
During the Summit, the program also leveraged the Tufts Humanist Chaplaincy’s relationship with Tisch Library, as well as new ones like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence Covenant of the CommonWealth which identifies as a philosophical Order. During their workshop, they provided space and ritual practices to examine themes of disorientation, kyriarchy, play, representation, and queer joy. Srishti helped facilitate a conversation with Canadian colleagues to discuss our national realities, opportunities to collaborate, and the power of a North American humanist model to influence international humanist governance.
As has happened throughout history, today there continue to be forces fighting against conceptual diversity and bodily autonomy. Thus, an urgent necessity to subvert the current hegemonic regimes including religious imaginaries and cultivating spaces that imagine liberation in evolving ways. Mark Schaffler, a retreat participant came with the following queries, “Why would someone choose to be a Humanist instead of anything else? Why should more people be Humanists? Over the weekend, I had this question answered for me. It was answered through the ways people acted, through how we considered each other, and connected.”
As the network continues to grow, we are reminded that the future we imagine begins with the relationships we care for today. The next gathering is slated to occur next summer, and will be coordinated by Anthony Cruz Pantojas, Evan Clark, other key leaders, and collaborators with diverse identities and experiences. The event will be hosted at Pitzer College in Southern California under the leadership of Dr. Phil Zuckerman, Professor of Secular Studies and Sociology.
The post Caring and Co-Presencing: Reflections and Insights from the Humanist Spark Summit appeared first on TheHumanist.com.
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