Small Group Reflection: Virginia Woolf

At the Tufts Humanist Chaplaincy, we hope to foster a comfortable environment for people to engage in honest discussions around the challenges in their lives, and to explore how people outside traditional religion approach questions that many faith traditions engage regularly. Our day to day lives, on campus and off, can be challenging just as they are exciting, but we don’t always have a structured hour in the week to sit down and reflect on the way we’ve grown, and the lessons we can learn from the experiences of others.

At small group reflections, the Humanist in Residence facilitates an open, respectful, and confidential conversation around a theme that concerns and informs many of our choices and experiences in our life journey. The conversation begins rooted in a text (or other piece of culture) written from a Humanist perspective that engages the theme, and from there will be open to the perspectives and experiences of everyone present in the group. Those present are encouraged to bring pieces of culture that inspire their own values on the theme, including and especially those from other faith traditions.

The upcoming small group reflection will begin with a passage from English writer Virginia Woolf. It will be on Friday, October 14th, at 5:30pm in the Interfaith Center downstairs meeting room. Small group reflections are open to all members of the Tufts community, irrespective of anyone’s belief background. Light refreshments will be served!

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 Virginia Woolf was an English writer, activist, and fixture in the modernist movement of the first half of the twentieth century. Perhaps best known for 1925’s Mrs. Dalloway, she is widely recognized for her lyrical engagement with lived experiences of religion and gender (including androgyny) as well as her experimental style that was distinct even within her own lexicon. Woolf is typically understood to have been an atheist, from her own proclamations, though did not herself use the Humanist label in the same way that did her father, Leslie Stephen.

This week, we’ll open our reflection with a passage from Woolf’s final novel, The Waves.