We are very fortunate to have such a dedicated and community-minded supporter in NOSHA board member, Marty Bankson, who does double-duty as the newsletter reporter for The Humanist Advocate, our quarterly publication reflecting on our recent meetings and activities. We couldn’t do it without him! He has his work featured on “At The Well” that tries to improve the image of Christians in American public discourse. That Bankson’s writing is featured here is a wonderful testament to the ideas and efforts…

~A special report from NOSHA member Eve Ortiz As 2015 comes to an end, NOSHA members came together once again to volunteer at the Second Harvest Food Bank. While families and friends all across the nation start preparing for their end of the year festivities, many see the need to give back to their communities through volunteer work. This time of year is about giving; giving our time and our labor can be the best gift of all. Food banks…

Mr. Alan Wolfe helps coordinate the “First Tuesdays: Spirituality in the City” speaker series and acts as the liaison between the guest speakers and a the co-sponsorship of The Immaculate Conception Jesuit Church and several other Catholics entities. Now in it’s seventh season, guests from diverse religions, human interest groups, and prominent leaders in local government and business are chosen to “initiate conversations about their spiritual traditions and address the theme ‘Spirituality in the City’.” We met up with Mr….

Harry Greenberger’s Secular Invocation New OrleansCity Council November 19, 2015   “I am Harry Greenberger, President Emeritus of the New Orleans Secular Humanist Association.   Thank you for having me today for my eighth secular invocation before this Council. Only one Councilperson now seated was here for any of those prior meetings, so I find it appropriate to give a quick explanation of the constitutional requirement that mandates allowance of such invocations. An old Supreme Court ruled that “Freedom of…

The November reading for  the NOSHA meeting by Connie Roeder Gordon Schultz (November 21, 2015) _____________ In 1990 as Voyager 1 spacecraft sailed away from Earth, Ground Control issued a command that directed the craft to turn around and look back from its 4 billion mile vantage point and photograph all the planets it had passed leaving our solar system. “From Voyager’s vast distance, the Earth was captured as an infinitesimal point of light, actually smaller than a single pixel…

NOSHA is collecting donations to help the Humane Society of Louisiana in their efforts to rebuild and recover from the horrific fire that destroyed their Tylertown shelter building. Animals lost their lives or are recovering from injuries and several employees lost  many personal belongings and will struggle with getting back on their feet. We are encouraging members to donate via our website and we’ll donate in the name of all secular humanists from our organization. Go to our website and…

At the October NOSHA meeting featuring journalist Bob Marshall on the status of the Louisiana coast, Board Member Rita Premo read excerpts from Aldo Leopold’s seminal collection of essays on wildlife management and conservation, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949). From the Foreword “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as…

Just call it another in a long list of “Only in New Orleans” quirks: book and produce professional musical acts in venues whose primary entertainment attraction is something other than live music. Like a bowling alley, for example—and call it “Rock ’n’ Bowl”; or a pinball parlor snuggled in a nondescript white shell of an abandoned church in a nondescript suburban neighborhood— and call it “PinChurch.” Mike Perry’s PinChurch and Mystic Krewe of the Silver Ball project is not yet…

  The St. Charles Parish Library in Luling, Louisiana, just upriver from New Orleans, has something unique: a planetarium. The planetarium is a 42-seat theater that projects images of our solar system and points beyond in a digital dome above and around the seating. The Director of the project is Jason Talley, also known as “The Planetarium Guy,” gave the presentation for the second Science Café presentation at the very un-planetarium-like Neutral Ground Coffeehouse on Danneel Street. Jason’s resume of…