When Bob Green and I were being interviewed last month for an article on humanism the reporter for the Salt Lake Tribune asked if we could summarize humanism in one sentence! It was a challenge that left us both feeling inadequate. A few days later I was reading an article by Howard B. Radest, Dean of the Humanist Institute, in which he comments extensively on the difficulty of defining humanism. Radest says, "The living stuff of humanism hides beneath a skilled playing of words. My humanism is the source of the richest meanings in my experience, but I am dumb despite a torrent of words when it come to conveying that richness." After reading his comments I felt less uncomfortable about our fumbling response to the Trib reporter, Peter Scarlet.

I would like to quote a little further from Radest's article "Intimacy: Humanism with a Human Face," published in Humanism Today Volume 6, page 105.

There are moments when humanism reaches into deeper places of my experience ... In the marriage ceremony we succeed in speaking directly to the joyous and fearful experiences of love of mutual support and respect, of marriage as a development and not a sacrament, of responsibility that is both intimate and communal, and of the nurture of the one and the other. Suspended in that moment of celebration are those endless disputations about What humanism stands for, and in their place is an experience of what humanism is.

I can report in the same way about memorials and funerals. The occasion is different and yet the same threads of human connection appear. The emphasis changes. In the presence of death I realize my loneliness and feel broken away, broken apart. My need is not for some never-never and false promises, but for the actually present connection, the touch of a hand, sound of a voice, glance of any eye that pulls me back from loneliness and beings to heal the brokenness. Here again, the humanist demonstrates the ability to care and to support."

Humanism, a philosophy that affirms human worth in every aspect of life, is too broad, too important to summarize in a single sentence. Our thanks to the Salt Lake Tribune for increasing public awareness of the humanist movement in Utah.

--Flo Wineriter