Humanize Me

There’s doom and gloom in the ether, and many people aren't feeling too great about the world. What to do?

Bart thinks the best move is to swing to the stoics, with a sense of separating what we can control versus what we can’t. Simply 'doing the next right thing'. Some things we can control: our next moves, our vote, our transactions, the ways we communicate, the protections we give our children, and what we pay attent...

Is it right, or not, to have biological children? The last time Bart addressed this issue in the podcast (Episode 514), it generated lots of passionate replies, including one listener in particular whose angry email we read aloud in this episode. Since we didn't feel we did the subject justice last time, or the people for whom it's an important question, we're revisiting it, having received some newer emails seeking cla...

A listener asks: "Hi Bart, I just want to encourage you by communicating how much your podcast has helped me and is sustaining me in my deconversion journey. In your conversation earlier this month with Ursula Goodenough, you talked about a reverence and awe for the natural world, and I couldn’t help but think of a bible verse admonishing Christians to worship the Creator, rather than the created. I could see my Christian frie...

They say you should never meet your heroes, but this conversation with Ursula Goodenough proves definitively that it isn't always true! Bart first read Ursula's book, The Sacred Depths of Nature, almost immediately after deconverting from Christianity many years ago. It was a massive influence on his thinking, providing a scientific basis for a rational devotion to life, and forming the narrative around which he based his v...

It was only a matter of time before we got drawn into the burgeoning conversation about recent advances in artificial intelligence. A listener called Steve asks: "What do you think are the implications of AI for those of us devoted to the human experience?" Although he doesn't have a clear answer, and admits a catastrophist's bias, Bart shares some initial thoughts in response and argues that, even if the rise of ...

You’re probably never going to be a saint. Even so, let’s face it: you could be a better person. We all could. Todd May is a philosopher whose work brings high-minded philosophical concepts - like how to live a decent life - down to earth in attainable, realistic ways. In this conversation with Bart Campolo, Todd talks about aspiring to be decent, moral gracefulness, reasons for morality, intentions, honesty and truthfulness, happi...

Two questions are posed to Bart, the first of which he declines to answer! Iain McGilchrist is one of several prominent thinkers who seem to suggest that consciousness is a fundamental of the universe, and that reality may not be entirely physical in nature. What does Bart think of these ideas? The second involves a listener whose liberal Christian friend can't understand her atheism. How can she articulate her disinterest to h...

Sasha Sagan is an author and now a podcaster who is intensely curious about the rituals, traditions, norms and practices which help define communities of people. When we had her on the podcast in 2020, it was because Sasha had released a book on the subject, For Small Creatures Such As We. The recent launch of her podcast, Strange Customs, inspired us to reach back out and ask her how rituals might find their place in today's w...

We've recently been wondering about the movement in Kentucky that has become known as the 'Asbury revival', and the mass religious experiences that have been reported there in the last couple of months. We could think of nobody better to help us think about it than TM Luhrmann, a highly esteemed psychological anthropologist currently based at Stanford University. Tanya is known partly for her study of religious groups, including ev...