For those of you who attended last year’s annual meeting, I was asked to talk about a Humanist curriculum framework we at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis were developing. Since that time, the Unitarian/Universalist denomination has acknowledged this work by flying me to Boston headquarters to talk about cooperating on a project to install this curriculum throughout my own Midwestern district. The aim is to try it out in Humanistic Unitarian/Universalist societies as well as in more theistic settings.
The general framework is applicable to a diverse population, but the specifics are up to each participating unit. We will share the resulting courses and use them as we see fit. We were aiming to create a public space like Maxine Greene has outlined where we shared our universals and let the diversity exist in the specifics. Maxine has provided me with the rationale for doing this. And it is my and Khoren Arisian’s great laugh that it is the Unitarian/Universalist Humanists who have provided a space in the denomination for discourse and cooperation in moral and ethical education. I strongly agree with Maxine Greene that Humanists must occupy the existing public spaces or create new ones.
Carol Wintermute did her undergraduate work at Denison University in Ohio where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. She did post-graduate work in psychology at the University of Minnesota. Her graduate studies were in family social science at Minnesota where she completed the course work for an M.A. and Ph.D. degree. She is a graduate of The Humanist Institute’s (currently known as the American Humanist Association Center for Education Humanist Studies Program) first-class. She also served as the Institute’s Co-President and Co-Dean, on the Board of Directors of the Humanist Foundation, American Humanist Association’s endowment fund and Institute for Humanist Studies. Carol died in 2016.