Your HSGP Board of Directors brought everyone up to date on the progress, plans and needs for our HCC (Humanist Community Center) building in Mesa. We answered your questions, suggestions as well as concerns and discussed completion plans for the building.

The Humanist Book Club meets on the fourth Saturday of each month at 10:30 a.m., Mesa Main Library, Main Branch, 64 East 1st Street (East of Country Club Way at the intersection of N. Centennial Way -- N.W. corner)

From Publishers Weekly:

Checking in on a friend's brother at Ivenwald, a Washington-based fundamentalist group living communally in Arlington, Va., religion and journalism scholar Sharlet finds a sect whose members refer to Manhattan's Ground Zero as "the ruins of secularism"; intrigued, Sharlet accepts on a whim an invitation to stay at Ivenwald. He's shocked to find himself in the stronghold of a widespread "invisible" network, organized into cells much like Ivenwald, and populated by elite, politically ambitious fundamentalists; Sharlet is present when a leader tells a dozen men living there, "You guys are here to learn how to rule the world." As it turns out, the Family was established in 1935 to oppose FDR's New Deal and the spread of trade unions; since then, it has organized well-attended weekly prayer meetings for members of Congress and annual National Prayer Breakfasts attended by every president since Eisenhower. Further, the Family's international reach ("almost impossible to overstate") has "forged relationships between the U.S. government and some of the most oppressive regimes in the world." In the years since his first encounter, Sharlet has done extensive research, and his thorough account of the Family's life and times is a chilling expose.

Dr. Leonard Gordon is Professor Emeritus of sociology, and was recently appointed to his second two-year term as Dean of the ASU Emeritus College. The Emeritus College is an official unit of Arizona State University whose members are retired ASU faculty with emeritus status. The purpose of the Emeritus College is to give a home and a focus to continued intellectual, creative and social engagement of retired faculty with the University. The Emeritus College fosters and promotes the scholarly and artistic lives of its members, prolonging fruitful engagement with and service to the University and the Community.

The Emeritus College provides the University a continued association with productive scientists, scholars and artists who have retired from their faculty positions but not from their disciplines.

The Humanist Book Club meets on the fourth Saturday of each month at 10:30 a.m., Mesa Main Library, Main Branch, 64 East 1st Street (East of Country Club Way at the intersection of N. Centennial Way -- N.W. corner)

From Publishers Weekly:

Fortified with Eeyoreish fatalism—I'm already unhappy. I have nothing to lose—Weiner set out on a yearlong quest to find the world's unheralded happy places. Having worked for years as an NPR foreign correspondent, he'd gone to many obscure spots, but usually to report bad news or terrible tragedies. Now he'd travel to countries like Iceland, Bhutan, Qatar, Holland, Switzerland, Thailand and India to try to figure out why residents tell positive psychology researchers that they're actually quite happy. At his first stop, Rotterdam's World Database of Happiness, Weiner is confronted with a few inconvenient truths. Contrary to expectations, neither greater social equality nor greater cultural diversity is associated with greater happiness. Iceland and Denmark are very homogeneous, but very happy; Qatar is extremely wealthy, but Weiner, at least, found it rather depressing. He wasn't too fond of the Swiss, either, uncomfortable with their quiet satisfaction, tinged with just a trace of smugness. In the end, he realized happiness isn't about economics or geography. Maybe it's not even personal so much as relational. In the end, Weiner's travel tales—eating rotten shark meat in Iceland, smoking hashish in Rotterdam, trying to meditate at an Indian ashram—provide great happiness for his readers.

Our Annual Solstice Party and Fund-raising Auction was a great event. We celebrated the Humanist holiday of HumanLight. We inaugurated our new board members and gave out the annual Helen Goldsmith Award to our most deserving volunteer, Shelley Newman. Our auction was hugely successful, bringing in $1783!

Alessandra Soler Meetze has been Executive Director of the ACLU of Arizona since February 2006. She brings nearly eight years of ACLU experience to Arizona, and is the first Latina to head the statewide civil liberties organization. She served as Communications Director of the ACLU’s fifth largest affiliate in Florida, where she was responsible for spearheading statewide public education campaigns. Before joining the ACLU, Meetze worked as a reporter for the Miami Herald, where she covered local government, business, crime and education. She also worked for a brief period at the Roanoke Times in Virginia. Meetze, who is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, graduated from the University of Florida with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism, and a minor in Latin American Studies.

Our HSGP member Dr. Geoff Clark gave his fifth talk to our group! Archaeologist and paleoanthropologist Geoffrey A. Clark is the author, co-author or editor of over 250 articles, notes, reviews and comments, and 11 monographs and books on human biological and cultural evolution in ‘deep time’—the past four million years. A University of Chicago Ph.D. (1971), his current interests turn on the logic of inference underlying knowledge claims in the various aspects of modern human origins research (Conceptual Issues in Modern Human Origins Research, co-edited with Cathy Willermet, Aldine de Gruyter [1997]; New Approaches to the Study of Early Upper Paleolithic ‘Transitional’ Industries in Western Eurasia, co-edited with Julien Riel-Salvatore, Archaeopress [2007]) and with applications of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory in archaeology (Rediscovering Darwin: Evolutionary Theory in Archaeological Explanation, co-edited with C. Michael Barton, American Anthropological Association [1997]). Clark has done fieldwork in Arizona, Mexico, France, Spain, Cyprus, Turkey and Jordan. Other research foci include European Mesolithic forager adaptations (The Mesolithic of the Atlantic Façade, co-edited with Manuel González Morales, ASU Anthropological Research Papers [2004]) and the peopling of the Americas (The Settlement of the American Continents, co-edited with C. Michael Barton, David Yesner and Georges Pearson, University of Arizona Press [2004]). A Regents' Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University, Clark has headed the Archeology Division of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and the Anthropology Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He lectures on race, racism and ethnic conflict; the evolution of human mating; the conflict between religion and science (‘creation science’); human evolution; and modern human origins. A materialist to the core, and a committed evolutionist, he has been concerned lately with the promotion of western science as a conceptual framework for describing and explaining the experiential world, and with contesting the claims of the various anti- and pseudo-science constituencies arrayed against it.

We held our annual elections at this meeting.

The Humanist Book Club meets on the fourth Saturday of each month at 10:30 a.m., Mesa Main Library, Main Branch, 64 East 1st Street (East of Country Club Way at the intersection of N. Centennial Way -- N.W. corner)

From Publishers Weekly:

A former submarine commander in Britain's Royal Navy, Menzies must enjoy doing battle. The amateur historian's lightly footnoted, heavily speculative re-creation of little-known voyages made by Chinese ships in the early 1400s goes far beyond what most experts in and outside of China are willing to assert and will surely set tongues wagging. According to Menzies's brazen but dull account of the Middle Kingdom's exploits at sea, Magellan, Dias, da Gama, Cabral and Cook only "discovered" lands the Chinese had already visited, and they sailed with maps drawn from Chinese charts. Menzies alleges that the Chinese not only discovered America, but also established colonies here long before Columbus set out to sea. Because China burned the records of its historic expeditions led by Zheng He, the famed eunuch admiral and the focus of this account, Menzies is forced to defend his argument by compiling a tedious package of circumstantial evidence that ranges from reasonable to ridiculous. While the book does contain some compelling claims-for example, that the Chinese were able to calculate longitude long before Western explorers-drawn from Menzies's experiences at sea, his overall credibility is undermined by dubious research methods. In just one instance, when confounded by the derivation of cryptic words on a Venetian map, Menzies first consults an expert at crossword puzzles rather than an etymologist. Such an approach to scholarship, along with a promise of more proof to come in the paperback edition, casts a shadow of doubt over Menzies's discoveries. 32 pages of color illus., 27 maps and diagrams.