By David Warden
On Friday 19th July, Humanistically Speaking Association held its Annual General Meeting. This year, we met in a community centre in Newhaven, near Brighton on the south coast of England.
I began proceedings with a fundamental question: ‘Why are we doing this?’ I was uplifted by the replies. We’re committed to Humanistically Speaking magazine because we want to give humanists at the grass roots a voice, so that humanism is not always a ‘top-down’ affair. Our core value is freedom and diversity of thought and expression, and as an independent magazine we can push at the boundaries of the ‘Overton Window’ (the range of ideas and opinions that are considered ‘acceptable’ at any given time). We also want to engage with people beyond the usual boundaries of humanism – we’re proud of our track record in publishing articles by religious people as well as humanists and secularists.
We had a full agenda looking at our financial situation (healthy), our Constitution (needs tweaking), our global reach (we've got readers across the world), and our stats (stable but healthy). Our main decision was to reduce the number of editions per year to six (from ten currently). This is to alleviate the sense of being on a relentless treadmill for our hard-working editors! We love producing Humanistically Speaking but we're all volunteers and some of us are not as young as we once were!
Humanistically Speaking was launched in February 2020, and so we are well into our fifth year of publication. Our founding editor, David Brittain, has had to take a step back recently but we were delighted that he was able to join us for the AGM.
We're conscious of the fact that, currently, our production and editorial team is predominantly men of retirement age – although Karl, our young Indian writer, is still a regular contributor and we do feature humanist writers from Africa as often as we can. We'd love to improve our demographic diversity so do please get in touch if you would like to join our team. We're looking for people on any continent with writing, editing, journalistic, and social media skills who feel that they are part of the worldwide humanist or freethinking community.
We would like to thank all of our readers for your continuing support and interest. There's no point doing this unless we are contributing something of value to the worldwide humanist community – so do please continue to give us your feedback, critiques, and encouragement.
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