For Harvard humanists, end of an era

One recent Sunday, a congregation of almost 100 gathered in a Harvard University auditorium for a sermon from an unusual preacher.

Roméo Dallaire, a retired Canadian lieutenant general, learned theology on the killing fields of Rwanda, where he led the United Nations peacekeeping force that failed to contain the 1994 genocide.

Dallaire spoke about how a largely Christian nation shed its religious scruples and plunged into mass slaughter. He recounted how his attempts to bring in more troops were rejected. He said the West's paralysis in the face of the killing and its contrasting, if tardy, forcefulness to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia teach an awful moral lesson.

''We've actually established a pecking order in humanity," he said, where ''some actually count more."

His listeners heard his homily courtesy of a seeming oxymoron: Harvard's humanist chaplaincy for atheist and agnostic students.

A presence on campus for more than 30 years, the humanist chaplaincy sponsors, among other things, the Harvard Secular Society, a group with about 20 active undergraduates who meet to discuss philosophical matters. Humanists bow before reason and science rather than the shrine of a deity; their prophets are rationalist thinkers such as Erich Fromm and Bertrand Russell.

Harvard humanists are preparing for a milestone this summer, the retirement of the man who started it all, chaplain Thomas Ferrick. A former priest, Ferrick lost his parents to tuberculosis as a child and found refuge from the loneliness of foster care in the idea of a loving God. But as an adult, he left Catholicism and the clergy after several disagreements. (His I'm-out-of-here moment came with the church's rejection of birth control.) Today, he says, he is one of only 10 or so humanist chaplains on American campuses.

Harvard's chaplaincy is in particularly good shape, having been endowed both financially, by a wealthy alumnus 10 years ago, and communally, by what campus humanists call the warm embrace of the school's religious chaplains and students.

Harvard officials knew they had many secular students requiring a guiding chaplain, Ferrick says. This is the Ivy League, not the Bible Belt.

''The most religious person at Harvard -- I don't even know if they believe in hell," says Matt Cutler, a humanist student at Harvard Divinity School. Colin Lockard, a Harvard senior, recalls engaging conversations with his freshman year roommate, a Catholic, about their different takes on existence.

Still, acceptance isn't influence, and Greg Epstein, the assistant humanist chaplain and Ferrick's replacement to be, envisions a day when humanists will be able to construct their own center to complement Harvard's churches and other student religious centers. ''The two things that I think we [humanists] need to learn how to do," he says, ''are to sing, in the metaphorical sense and the literal sense, and to build."

Liberal and conservative believers bicker over the particulars of belief, and humanists are no different, frequently disagreeing over the meaning of humanism and even vocabulary. Take a simple word like faith.

''I personally see a humanist as a person of faith," Epstein says. ''Humanism is a faith that people do have the strength to solve enough of their problems, if they work together and they care about one another, to live meaningful lives" without a belief in an almighty god.

But as he talks, senior Kerry Dingle, joining him and other humanists for a group interview, shakes her head. ''I really, really hate the word 'faith,' " she says. ''Faith is by definition believing something without evidence."

Raised Catholic, Dingle spurned the sacrament of Confirmation when she was 14 ''because I didn't really believe in it."

''I grew up with religion," she adds. ''I've determined that there's nothing that religion has to offer me. People can talk to me until they're blue in the face about their religion, and it's not going to make a difference."

Epstein, 28, offers a more seasoned take. Just as believers can learn from humanists, he says, ''I do think that there's a tremendous amount that we can learn from religious people. I'm particularly appreciative of the way that they take care of one another . . . I believe that there's a word, the human 'spirit,' that does signify something that we do believe exists, which is an emotional desire to live a good life and to search for sources of inspiration and empowerment."

Cutler acknowledges feeling hostility toward conservative evangelical Christians, but also says: ''They were in the Sudan and advocating for intervention in the Sudan long before almost anyone else. I don't think the humanist community can assert itself, unless it's willing to take action."

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