I count on this being the first of many valuable Institute Newsletters, and want to thank Class V for taking on the task, and especially Lloyd Kumley for being point person. We need to stay in touch and maintain the intensity of our several class experiences. We need to support each other, and to share wisdom as we find it. I hope each of you will pass on suggestions for format, content, and the like to make this venture maximally useful.

I’m happy to report that class VII is now underway, co-mentored by Suzanne Paul and Howard Radest. Ten students are aboard, and enthusiasm is high.

With deep sadness I read today the obituary of Kenneth Patton. His poetry and pioneering radicalism in Unitarian Universalist circles will long live among us. Ken’s full career as poet and celebrant of naturalistic religion helps refute the canard that humanism is necessarily cerebral and emotionless. Look back on some of his writings as a fitting memorialization.

One thing that I hope our Newsletter will do is help us stay abreast of useful humanist information by sharing our readings. My nomination includes a new book ((Dean R. Hoge, Benton Johnson & Donald A. Luidens, Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers (Oxford University Press, 1994).) which is a useful summary of theories about mainstream church decline and a testing of those theories by an extensive telephone interviews of a sample of Presbyterian confirmands born in the Baby Boom years (with a control group of older Presbyterians) They classify them into 8 groups. The last two are of particular interest to humanists&endash;the uninvolved religious and the nonreligious. I urge you to get the book and read especially pages 134-162. You might also want to ponder their claim that "most" of the still-active Presbyterians are "lay liberals." By this term they mean ‘unaffected’ by theological fashions and ‘unconvinced’ that there is only one true religion or savior. They also note that such skepticism emerges in the highschool years, several years earlier than I found among Unitarian Universalists in the 1960s. The implications of this are enormous in assessing the whereabouts and nature of American potential humanists.

Another book that I have found fascinating is Robert Wuthnow’s Sharing the Journey: Support Groups and America’s New Quest for Community (Free Press, 1994). His researches have turned up an amazing U.S. involvement with support groups of all kinds. "four out of every ten Americans belong to a small group that meets regularly and provides caring and support for its members." His findings counterpoint the prevalent conventional wisdom about widespread individualism. He also sees a religious revitalization underway that will redefine ‘spirituality’ and maybe even change the large society.

But the most fascinating book I have recently read is George Marsden’s The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford Univ. Press, 1994). He is an historian of American evangelicalism now teaching at Notre Dame and of considerably conservative sentiments. He focuses on the elite universities, claiming that the very liberalism and inclusiveness of their Protestant origins eventually marginalized that very theological position. His strictures on the changes at Harvard and Chicago will be of great interest to humanists. He also documents well the case that 18th and 19th-century Protestantism was clearly evangelical, stressing Biblicism and missions. I find that many humanists think of Protestantism in liberal Protestant terms, which has always been a serious misreading, especially in earlier times.

Robert Tapp