Greetings, folks. In this podcast, I hope to explore the various facets of humanism from as many perspectives as I can manage. Some episodes will focus on the humanism as it has developed here in the West while others will look farther afield, sometimes to places that might surprise you. Always, though, the podcast will keep an eye toward how these ideas relate to contemporary life, and toward defending humanism against the anti-humanist discourses of fundamentalist religion and authoritarian politics that define so much of our public conversation.
Resist theocracy. Always.
This episode concludes the two-part series on Early Modern Feminism by skipping across the Eurasian landmass to look at a precise contemporary of Jane Anger, the Elizabethan thinker and writer we looked at last week. Li Zhi was a cantankerous thinker and writer who suffered neither fools nor dogma gladly, and who was not afraid to take on some of the most deeply held prejudices of his society. He was deeply studied in the so-called “three schools” of Chinese culture—Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism—and used this knowledge to craft an argument for the equality of women and men that, though it contradicted the tradition of the very conservative society in which he lived, remained true to the logic of its guiding worldviews. He offers a critique of patriarchal institutions, explores the recognition of human equality in the Confucian historical cannon, and deconstructs gendered social distinctions through the lens of Chan/Zen Buddhism. For his trouble, he died in custody but served as an inspiration for subsequent generations. One of my greatest intellectual and ethical heroes: I hope you enjoy his story.
14 Jul 2022
Early Modern Feminism 1: Jane Anger
This episode and the next one lean hard into the “eclectic” side of “Eclectic Humanist.” Following up on the series on Roe v. Wade, I'd like to turn the clock back a few hundred years and look at a couple of examples of Early Modern feminism. There is, after all, an ongoing and unabashed effort from the religious right to turn the clock pretty far back, so it may be useful in the context of women's rights to take a glimpse into the world before the advances made by four centuries of feminist writing and activism. This installment takes us to Elizabethan England. We start with a discussion of women's status in the society of the day, including justifications for the subjugation of women in the words of the men who made them, then look at some specific legal restrictions to which women were subject. The main focus, though, is the writing of the little-known Jane Anger, to my mind the first English feminist. While her work is short, it is rich in terms of both arguments and rhetoric, preempting in some ways the arguments made some 200 years later by Mary Wollstonecraft. What I look at in particular here is her critique of the ways in which theological arguments are used to support misogynist positions, and her rejection not just of the arguments, but of the types of argument, that separate medieval from modern thought.
Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/hartzmann/no-time-to-die
License code: NHAGIVYDFPYQFCS3
7 Jul 2022
Roe v. Wade 3: My Daughter's Enemy
This episode wraps up, for now, the series I've been doing on the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It discusses the marriage of White Evangelical Christianity with the anti-choice cause in the wake of that 1973 decision, and begins to address the influence of the Christian nationalist ideology known as Dominion Theology on American politics generally and the Republican Party and White Evangelical Christianity specifically. From here, we jump into some statistics, specifically statistics on the ongoing decline of religious affiliation in the US, and the pressure that the projected continuation of this decline puts on today's aspiring theocrats to establish their new Promised Land before the demographic window closes on them for good. I try, as well, to offer a few thoughts on the role the overturning of Roe v Wade might play in the establishing of the American theocracy that we are now watching unfold, and reversing the decades-long trend of emptying pews. The episode wraps with a brief discussion of my own reasons for the position I've taken on this issue—really, kind of a rant. I hope you find it interesting and useful.
Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/hartzmann/no-time-to-die
License code: NHAGIVYDFPYQFCS3
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