Every Harvard graduate can remember the strange emotion that accompanies a student’s first September in Cambridge: that curious combination of tremendous excitement and apprehensive self-doubt. Like so many young freshmen, I came to Harvard barely knowing another soul. But there to greet me, with a kind smile, open arms, and always a warm word, was Tom Ferrick, then Harvard’s Humanist Chaplain. When I learned that there was a Humanist Chaplaincy on campus, I knew that Harvard would be home.
Only today can I fully appreciate how vital the Humanist Chaplaincy was to my acclimation to the Harvard community. Some of my earliest and closest friendships were formed through the Chaplaincy. During my college years the Chaplaincy sponsored social events and unique academic lectures that enhanced my undergraduate experience, from intimate community gatherings to memorable and engaging presentations by E.O. Wilson, Steve Allen, and other intellectual and cultural luminaries. When I returned to Cambridge for my law degree, the Chaplaincy provided a ready means of reconnecting with the campus humanist community. Over the last thirty years, the Chaplaincy has likewise enriched the lives and intellectual development of countless other young humanists.
On Harvard’s campus, the Chaplaincy provides for atheist, agnostic, humanist, and non-religious students the crucial community services that religious students can take for granted. Virtually all universities provide social networks for religious students, from Hillel to Newman Centers to Campus Crusade for Christ, with chaplains and counselors of every imaginable religious variety to provide comfort and guidance that are critical to young students’ development and success. Yet all too often, humanist students are left to face the demands of a new and alien environment alone. In today’s social and political climate, it is all too easy for people of no faith to feel increasingly like outsiders rather than full members of the community.
Imagine, then, what it is to be a young man or woman transplanted tens, hundreds, or even thousands of miles from home, and forced to confront one of life’s inevitable crises without the immediate support of family: anxiety about academics; the traumatic breakup of a romantic relationship; the death of a loved one. Fortunately, members of Harvard’s humanist community need not cope alone.
The Humanist Chaplaincy affords humanist students a welcoming and necessary sanctuary. Harvard’s non-religious community finds in the Humanist Chaplain a sympathetic ear and an experienced counselor capable of assisting atheist, agnostic, and humanist students with problems of life and death, love and loss, and other difficult issues. In addition to enriching the emotional and social lives of students, the Humanist Chaplaincy plays an essential role in the modern humanist movement beyond the Harvard campus. The Chaplaincy provides a unique, high-profile platform for humanist initiatives and helps to bring humanism’s message to a nation and a world that desperately need it.
For too long America’s non-religious community has been relegated to the fringes of our political discourse. Atheists, freethinkers, and humanists, who include many of the most famous and influential scientists, intellectuals, community leaders, and historical figures, are too often caricatured as extremists and moral degenerates, to the extent that they constitute America’s most distrusted and misunderstood minority, below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians, and other minority groups. By sustaining a prominent community of humanist scholars at one of the world’s most recognized and respected universities, the Humanist Chaplaincy helps to correct common prejudices and to restore to humanism the esteem that it deserves. For all of the services it provides, the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard needs your support.
The wealth of resources accessible to religious student organizations dwarfs the Humanist Chaplaincy’s comparatively meager budget. Harvard Hillel alone works on an annual operating budget of well over $2.3 million, while the Campus Crusade for Christ boasts global annual fundraising of over $380 million. With this considerable financial backing, religious campus organizations have increased their membership roles by orders of magnitude. Over the past two decades, the number of students affiliated with Campus Crusade for Christ has increased by over 500% at Harvard, and more than 700% at Yale.
Though Harvard students’ interest in humanism has also grown measurably in recent years, the Humanist Chaplaincy’s resources are woefully modest in comparison to those of its religious counterparts. The Chaplaincy’s aspirations, however, are no less ambitious, and certainly far more important. With the necessary funding, the Chaplaincy stands ready to offer ambitious programs and vital services to the university’s non-religious community, including the following:
- A major international conference celebrating Thirty Years of Humanism at Harvard, which was held in April, 2007. Speakers included E.O. Wilson, Steven Pinker, Salman Rushdie, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, Ambassador John L. Loeb, Jr., and many others. This event drew extensive worldwide media coverage and was held in conjunction with the annual conference of the Secular Students Alliance; in attendance were leaders from the national Ethical Culture Society; the Secular Coalition for America; the American Humanist Association, the Society for Humanistic Judaism; and nearly every other prominent Humanist and secularist organization.
- The first-ever full-credit class at an Ivy League institution on modern humanism, open to every undergraduate and graduate student at Harvard University. With proper planning, this class will serve as a training program to place future Humanist Chaplains at schools and universities throughout the nation.
- The endowment of a retirement fund for Tom Ferrick, Harvard’s first Humanist Chaplain, who generously devoted three decades of his life to serving full-time the needs of Harvard’s humanist community.
- The endowment of a permanent, full-time position for Harvard’s Humanist Chaplain, who currently lives on a part-time salary.
- A permanent facility to house the Chaplaincy’s office and library.
None of these projects, however, can ever come to fruition without crucial financial support.Today the Humanist Chaplaincy is in urgent need of your help. If you have ever considered making a donation to the Humanist Chaplaincy, now is the time to do it. Seated at the heart of one of the nation’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, with access to the finest scholars in the world, the Humanist Chaplaincy stands in a unique position to help spread humanism’s important message of reason, tolerance, and compassion. We as a national humanist community cannot allow this potential to go to waste.
If you have ever bristled when pundits blithely remark that those without religious faith can have no morality; if you have ever been troubled by the Religious Right’s self-serving conflation of religiosity with patriotism; if you are bothered by the increasing influence of pernicious religious dogma on our public policy, from attempts to inject creationist confusion in our science classrooms to the hijacking of health policy and vital medical research in the name of “Value Voters”; if the shrill and increasingly vocal rhetoric of religious extremists has ever made you feel like a stranger in your own country; if you ever wished you could do something – anything – to bring about change, then now is your chance to act.Please give generously to the Humanist Chaplaincy to help ensure that the voice of humanism will be heard loud and clear.
I am grateful for the nourishment, both intellectual and emotional, that Harvard’s Humanist Chaplaincy has provided for me and so many others through the years. Harvard stands unique among institutions of higher learning as having our nation’s first chaplaincy dedicated to serving the needs of religious skeptics.
I am proud of the Chaplaincy’s three-decade tradition, and I would like every generation of Harvard students to benefit from all that the Chaplaincy offers. Please join me in supporting the Humanist Chaplaincy, and ensuring that humanism will always have a home at Harvard.
A.B. 1999, J.D. 2004