Our Mission is:
To expand an ethical and life-affirming Humanist community devoted to science, reason, inclusion and social responsibility.
Find friends. Share ideas. do good.
JH Monthly Meeting
"Book Challenges and Public Libraries"
Sunday, November 26th at 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
AT JEFFERSON UNITARIAN CHURCH, GOLDEN, CO.
Speaker: Franca Rosen
Books are being challenged in libraries in Colorado and across the country. How do libraries prepare for these Challenges? Franca Rosen, Collection Manager at the Jefferson County Public Library (JCPL), will discuss the vision and values of JCPL and the criteria JCPL uses to select books for the collection. When someone challenges a book, video, or program, what is the process for consideration? Who makes the final decision? Ms Rosen will also discuss the challenges to books around Colorado.
Ms Rosen says, “A love of reading, learning and answering questions led to a career as a public librarian. I started in a small Canadian municipal library as a reference and interlibrary loan librarian. A move to Colorado and the Jefferson County Public Library (JCPL) was the next step in my library career. I started at JCPL as the Interlibrary Loan Supervisor before moving into the role of the Collection Services and Interlibrary Loan Supervisor. Currently, I am the Collections Manager for JCPL. My career at JCPL spans 31 years and counting.”
SCHEDULE
We will serve appetizers from 4:00 to 4:30, then start the program. A small donation is suggested for the food, and wine will be served for a $3 donation. The program will include announcements and a Humanist Moment before the presentation begins.
JH Monthly Meeting
Existential Climate Change: The future of humankind
Sunday, April 28th at 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
AT JEFFERSON UNITARIAN CHURCH, GOLDEN, CO.
Speaker: Jonathan Stickel, Ph.D
Human-caused climate change poses a serious threat to humanity and Earth as we know it. For several decades, the accepted approach for mitigating climate change has focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. What we need to do, climate activists claim, is to avoid using energy where we can, use existing energy more efficiently, and convert energy sources from fossil fuels to renewables. Although these conservations and technical solutions are available, for a cost, they are not being implemented nearly fast enough. Considering the potentially massive magnitude and scope of climate change, assuredly altering human life and the entire Earth in profound ways, it is worth taking a step back and looking at climate change with a broader lens. Drawing on knowledge from science, philosophy, and psychology, Stickel will examine the likely outcomes of climate change, why so little progress is being made to mitigate it, and what it means if we ultimately do not succeed.
Jonathan Stickel, Ph.D., is a Director of R&D at Carbon America, a startup company developing and deploying carbon-capture technology. He has 20+ years of national-lab and industrial experience leading and performing R&D for carbon capture, energy sustainability, biofuels, and biopharmaceuticals. He has co-authored more than 40 journal articles that report on the results of these research programs. Jonathan has a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Davis.
JH Monthly Meeting
Homelessness in Jefferson County, Colorado
Sunday, February 25th at 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
AT JEFFERSON UNITARIAN CHURCH, GOLDEN, CO.
Speaker: Cassie Ratliff
In February, Cassie Ratliff will join us for her presentation on Homelessness in Jefferson County.
Homelessness is a major issue throughout metro Denver, and Jefferson County is no exception. Have you wondered what problems people who are unhoused face? How many are homeless in JeffCo, and why? What services are available to people facing homelessness? Ratliff will share her experiences in working with people who are unhoused and approaches that government, non-profits, and individuals can use to work on the issues.
Cassie Ratliff is Chief Impact Officer of Family Tree. She brings almost 20 years of experience in supportive housing, homelessness and domestic violence. She has extensive experience in social services and nonprofit management and oversees execution, integration and evaluation for Family Tree programs and services and continuous quality improvement. She provides strategic leadership for all programmatic and operational aspects of all programs at Family Tree.
About Family Tree
Family Tree works alongside people affected by child abuse, domestic violence and homelessness throughout their journey to safety and economic independence, providing emergency residential services, case management and advocacy, therapeutic services, outreach support, housing search and placement, education and employment support, among many other services. By leveraging a deeper, broader and more holistic array of life-changing services and programs, Family Tree empowers individuals and families to discover their own strengths to create lasting, positive change.
JH Monthly Meeting
Working with Wildflowers in a Changing Climate
Sunday, January 28th at 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
AT JEFFERSON UNITARIAN CHURCH, GOLDEN, CO.
Speaker: David Inouye
In January, David Inouye will join us for his presentation, Working with wildflowers in a changing climate: The value of long-term research.
David will talk about how the climate has changed in Colorado over the past 50 years, and how those changes are influencing mountain wildflowers and their pollinators. His insights come from having spent his career as a researcher at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, near Crested Butte, working with wildflowers, bumble bees, hummingbirds, butterflies, and flies. One of the interesting wildflowers he works with is a gentian that flowers once and then dies, after spending as long as a century growing until it’s big enough to flower.
David Inouye is a retired professor from the University of Maryland, who has spent 53 years doing research at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. His long-term research there includes work on plant demography (following individual plants for as long as 50 years), hummingbirds (helping document the oldest known hummingbird in the wild), and the phenology (timing) and abundance of flowering by about 120 species of wildflowers that he and his collaborators check three times a week for the whole growing season (since 1973). He’s also helping with the most extensive and longest monitoring program for native bees in Colorado. His work was featured in articles in National Geographic last April, and in the Colorado Sun this summer.
https://www.meetup.com/jeffcohumanists/events/298159693/
JH Monthly Meeting
"Mary Shelley Speaks and Frankenstein Lives Again"
Sunday, October 22nd at 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
AT JEFFERSON UNITARIAN CHURCH, GOLDEN, CO.
Speaker: Mary Shelley
It’s October, and we celebrate with a visit by Mary Shelly. Teen-age mother, behind-the-scenes supporter of social reform, romantic, and scholar, English writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) may be best known as the author of Frankenstein, but there is much more to be learned about her, both personally and psychologically. As Mary reveals her process as an author in creating Frankenstein, you learn how she viewed the world around her and how, in turn, the world treated her.
In addition to a compelling personal story which would make many articles in The National Enquirer seem tame, Mary Shelley’s work raises ethical questions that are, if anything, more pertinent today than they were in her lifetime. Is humankind morally capable of managing its technological creations? And what responsibility do we collectively hold in caring for abandoned members of society? Mary Shelley raises these questions within the context of having lived most of her life as an outsider.
Speaker Bio: Storysmith® Susan Marie Frontczak brings history and literature to life, creates stories from thin air, and hones personal experience into tales worth telling again and again. She was invited to create a living history of Mary Shelley in connection with a nationally traveling exhibit on Frankenstein. The exhibit was developed as a collaboration between the American Library Association and the U.S. National Library of Medicine. For Susan Marie, learning about Mary Shelley became a journey into the creative process. She bears witness to how Shelley’s own personal experiences inform a story that seems, from the outside, a fantastical invention. Mary’s imagination sublimates suffering into a challenge, probing what it means to be human.
Furthermore, for Susan Marie, Frankenstein represents coming full circle: In her early life, she delighted in the magical and supernatural of fairy tales. This was supplanted for a number of years by a career in the sciences and engineering. Frankenstein brings her back to the supernatural, albeit transformed into the possible by today’s tech wizardry and shadowed by the question mark of bioethical responsibility.
We thank Colorado Humanities for their financial support of this program.
Blog & News
UNDERSTANDING ALZHEIMER’S AND DEMENTIA BY BRENDA GURUNG
Jefferson Humanists will meet in-person again in July! Please join us for an in-person meeting at the Jefferson Unitarian Church on Sunday, July 24th at
FROG
FROG, by coordinator Helena FROG, the Free thinkers Reading Opportunity Group, is the book group sponsored by theJefferson Humanists. We generally meet the second Saturday
JH Monthly Meeting: Adrian Miller on The President’s Kitchen Cabinet
The Jefferson Humanists’ monthly chapter meeting will have a presentation by Adrian Miller titled, The President’s Kitchen Cabinet Join James Beard Award-winning author Adrian Miller
JH Monthly Meeting: The Humanism in Star Trek
On Sunday, February 27, Jefferson Humanists were pleased to have Susan Sackett speak on “The Humanism in Star Trek.” Sackett worked with Star Trek creator
Mailing Address
P.O. Box 1622, Arvada, CO 80001