When: Tuesday, December 7th 2010 at 6:30 pm
Where: 1157 Lexington Avenue (at 80th street), New York, NY 10075
The Center for Inquiry in New York City and All Souls Unitarian Church are co-sponsoring a pre-holiday panel focusing on mixed marriages—including unions between atheists and religious believers as well as interfaith unions (yes, we deliberately picked the date to leave everyone free for Christmas, Chanukah, and the Winter Solstice, in the hope of reducing holiday stress).
The discussion will focus on the challenges and difficulties of raising children in such marriages—or being brought up by parents who may have quite different ideas about belief and nonbelief. Nearly 40 percent of American marriages today are religiously “mixed”—and that doesn’t even count atheists with spouses who practice a religion, because pollsters don’t generally include atheists in their surveys on mixed marriages. Do these marriages tend to produce children who are confused or who are educated in more than one way of thinking about both religion and secularism? What if the parents’ beliefs clash? Are miexed marriages the result of a growing secularization of society? These are just a few of the questions we’ll be exploring.
The two main speakers will be John Shook, director of education and science and policy programs for the Center for Inquiry Transnational, and Nancy Northup, president of the Board of All Souls. Northup is the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a global human rights organization dedicated to using international law to further women’s reproductive freedom. Shook is a philosopher and the author of numerous books. Both have personal experience with child-rearing issues in mixed marriages. Shook raised his children with a Roman Catholic wife, and Northup has children who were educated in both Unitarian and Jewish traditions. The panel will be moderated by Susan Jacoby, author of Half-Jew: A Daughter’s Search for Her Family’s Buried Past. Jacoby, program director of CFI-NYC, is the child of a marriage between a Catholic and a non-observant Jew.
A wine and canapé reception begins at 6:30 p.m., and the formal program at 7. Those of you who attended our December event last year with All Souls—on the difficulties of abandoning a fundamentalist faith--will remember that this was one of the liveliest programs of our season.
Admission is free and open to the public.
Reasonable New York is a consortium of local reason-based organizations and people working together to increase awareness of secular-minded movements throughout the Greater New York area. We aim to inform New Yorkers that there is a community of people who share a rational basis for their worldviews, who attend intellectual public lectures, enjoy philosophy discussions, and socialize. We invite you to visit our various member groups, to contact any of those in which you are interested, and check out our calendar to attend gatherings of any of our organizations, many of which are free. Some of these events are also posted on our shared meetup site.
