Feeling prejudice against someone because of their race is pretty foreign to me, but this past weekend I was blindsided by a tsunami of my own prejudice. My husband and I had finished a walk in Acadia National Park near where we live, and I heard a group of people speaking Russian – a language I’ve studied,…
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(A Call to Action by Steve Cochrane, Executive Director of the Institute for Humane Education) Over the past two years, life as we know it has changed. We have seen the entire world impacted by disease. We are watching the atrocities of war through our daily news feeds. We are facing a climate crisis, a crisis…
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Introduction: Paul K. Chappell is an international peace educator, author, and founder of Peace Literacy. He graduated from West Point, was deployed to Iraq, and left active duty as a Captain. Realizing that humanity is facing new challenges that require us to become as well-trained in waging peace as soldiers are in waging war, Chappell…
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I am a humane educator, someone who teaches about the cruelties, destruction, and injustices we perpetrate on other humans, animals, and the environment and who helps people cultivate compassion and integrity and become solutionaries able and motivated to build humane, healthy, and just societal systems. It is in this capacity – rather than as an expert in geopolitics or…
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On January 5, 2022, Pope Francis spoke in Rome and described people who have pets instead of children as selfish. He went on to say that pet keeping was “a denial of fatherhood and motherhood and diminishes us, takes away our humanity.” There’s so much that is wrong about his statement. 1. Spoken by someone who himself chose not…
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I’m writing this post on the Winter Solstice – the longest night of the year. As I watched the sunrise this morning, and as the vermilion clouds put on the stunning show captured in this photograph, I felt my usual complex feelings on this day. The first day of winter, when we enter the coldest…
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When I was in my twenties, a friend and I went to a Tom Waits performance in Chicago. We had perfect center seats close to the front. But although the theater was packed, the two seats next to us were empty. As the theater darkened and the performance began, two people entered and took the…
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Introduction: Ariane White began working in education in 2003 as a high school teacher before earning her M.Ed. degree with the Institute for Humane Education in 2010. She earned her doctoral degree in education from Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in 2019. LMU has recently launched a Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Center, which…
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I take a CrossFit class almost every morning. The workouts are often quite intense, but they are usually short. When faced with a movement I don’t like—like “Wallballs” or the “Assault Bike”—I remind myself that I can do anything for 15 minutes. I find my resolve because the ask is limited. I’m able to manage…
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Introduction: After graduating from college and moving to Maine in 1970, Robert Shetterly taught himself drawing, printmaking, and painting, becoming an illustrator at newspapers and of approximately 30 books. After the 9/11 attacks, Rob painted a portrait of Walt Whitman, etching a quote from Whitman on the painting. Thus began his Americans Who Tell the…
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