Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants
Humanism as a Way of Life: Liberals, Cultural Reform, and the Humanist Movement in the 1930s and 1940
Department
History Department
College
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Date Range
2013-2014
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities
Abstract
In the period between the world wars, a variety of intellectuals linked their projects of social criticism and hopes of social transformation to humanism, a word that evoked the Renaissance revival of classical learning and the ascription of dignity to man as a product of nature. For others, it simply meant a naturalistic understanding of humans and their place in the universe. Traditionalist critics of modern hedonism self-identified as New Humanists but so did a group of liberal-minded Unitarian ministers and divinity students (allied with philosophers such as John Dewey and Roy Wood Sellars) who were advancing a non-theistic religion that eschewed supernaturalism and uphold liberal social values. .
Conference Name
2013 Society for U.S. Intellectual History Annual Conference
Conference Location
Irvine, CA
ScholarWorks Citation
Murphy, Paul, "Humanism as a Way of Life: Liberals, Cultural Reform, and the Humanist Movement in the 1930s and 1940" (2014). Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants. 821.
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/fsdg/821
