SSA eMpirical No. 32 - Back into that Secular Groove
| Secular Student eMpirical 09/23/2008 |
In this issue:
- Introduction
- New SSA Resources for Student Groups
- Welcome to Our New Affiliates!
- Secular Alliance at Indiana University Makes a Statement.
- Atheism at Dartmouth
- Dan Barker: How to Talk to a Fundamentalist
- A Harvard Student's Experience at the Secular Student Alliance Conference
- Student Voice Follow-Up: University of Michigan SSA
- Express Yourself in a HumanLight Design Contest!
- The Blogging of a Secular Lobbyist
- Welcome to Our New Senior Campus Organizer
| The SSA only exists because of your support. Please donate today. Secular shorts: The Edger is a new blog, presenting news, views and event promotion on issues pertaining to secularism, atheism, science, humanism, and the cosmos. Check it out! Dale McGowan, editor of Parenting Beyond Belief  , wins the 2008 Harvard Humanist of the Year Award. Congrats!Two days before September 11, the Freedom From Religion Foundation runs a bold ad in the New York Times! The Boise State Secular Student Alliance lands a feature article in their independent student paper! Read it here. A conservative group is persuading tax-exempt churches to endorse political candidates, despite specific laws against it. Read it in the Washington Post. Did your group have a table at your university's orientation fair? The Edger is running a poll to see how many people are signing up. You can add your group's numbers here. Recent SSA Grant Awards The SSA offers grants to student groups to support operations and projects. Here are some projects that groups are using these grants for! Find more information and apply here. Secular Alliance of IU Indiana University Bloomington "From Christian to Atheist" (lecture by John Loftus) Date: Sep. 14 Amount awarded: $200 Read news coverage! Atheists, Humanists, & Agnostics University of Wisconsin - Madison "Science Education: Caught in the Middle of the War between Science and Religion" (lecture by PZ Myers) Date: Sep. 19 Amount awarded: $200 Contact us! Call us toll free at 1-877-842-9474. You can also email us at ssa@secularstudents.org. We are always happy to hear from you and answer any questions or concerns! What do you think? This is your eNewsletter and we are always updating and changing to fit your needs, so please let us know what you think of our new format! Email enews@secularstudents.org with any suggestions, ideas, or comments. eMpirical Team Editor-in-Chief: Elizabeth R.A. Liddell Editors: August E. Brunsman IV, Hemant Mehta, Jacquie Kuzma, Brian Gelletly | IntroductionThe SSA is growing, and there's lots going on! We've just finished up new and updated resources for our student groups (with more on the way) and are welcoming new affiliates and new staff! We're happy to feature several articles from students in this issue, and Dan Barker gives pointers on how to talk to fundamentalists. We also had the chance to follow up on one of our Student Voice Interviews from 2007, and talk to Lori Lipman Brown about her recent appearance on the Colbert Report.New SSA Resources for Student Groups Read more... Welcome to Our New Affiliates!Read more... Secular Alliance at Indiana University Makes a Statement This was Sarah Kaiser's statement for the Secular Alliance of IU (at Indiana University Bloomington) callout meeting on September 11, 2008. The group, of which she is president, decided that it should have a semi-formal callout meeting at which the president stood up and spoke about what the group is and what they want to do, as well as talk about upcoming events and activities. Read more... Atheism at Dartmouth When Dartmouth student Alex DiBranco decided to write an article looking into perspectives on atheism, she wasn't prepared for the widespread default assumption that atheists can't be moral. She expanded her investigation and composed this series of articles describing her findings. This is the first of a three-part series. By Alex DiBranco.Read more... Dan Barker: How to Talk to a Fundamentalist "I know how to talk to a fundamentalist. Well, I know how to talk to the kind of fundamentalist I used to be, so I guess I know how to talk to myself. But that is something." Dan Barker, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, gives some advice on how to successfully confront a Fundamentalist. This is the first of a two-part series written exclusively for the eMpirical. By Dan Barker. A Harvard Student's Experience at the Secular Student Alliance Conference Andrew Maher, an undergraduate at Harvard University, was able to attend the E. Pluribus Unum conference this past summer in Washington, D.C. Here, he describes his experience and his reactions to the conference. By Andrew Maher.Read more... Student Voice Follow-Up: University of Michigan SSA When we last interviewed this group, President Patrick Julius was struggling with getting his group recognized by the university and finding more members. Leslie Zukor provides us with this follow-up interview so we can see how far this group has come! By Leslie A. Zukor.Read more... Express Yourself in a HumanLight Design Contest HumanLight is a holiday celebrated around December 23rd specifically to acknowledge reason, family, friendship, and other shared, secular values of humankind. The HumanLight Committee is hosting a HumanLight Holiday card and ornament design contest for secularists of all ages. Read more... The Blogging of a Secular Lobbyist September 9 - As Seen on the Colbert ReportLori Lipman Brown is Director of the Secular Coalition for America, where she serves as the first Congressional lobbyist representing atheists. She is also a speaker on the SSA's Speaker's Bureau. She writes a weekly blog for The Humanist; we reprint select articles with permission. Read more... Welcome to Our New Senior Campus Organizer It gives me great pleasure to announce that Lyz Liddell will be joining our staff as senior campus organizer. Lyz has been volunteering as the Editor-in-Chief for the Secular Student Alliance's eMpirical for over two years--so she should already be very familiar to most of you. By August E. Brunsman IV, Executive DirectorRead more... |
 For more information, visit secularstudents.org. If you are having trouble viewing this E-Mail, it can be viewed on our website. | |
Submitted by Lyz on Fri, 09/19/2008 - 11:38
