Small Group Reflection: Alice Walker

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 poem by Alice Walker. It will be on Friday, September 8th, at 4:00pm 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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Alice Walker is an American writer, poet, and activist. She is perhaps best known for her novel The Color Purple which explored the lives of African American women living in the American South in the ’30s. The American Humanist Association name her the 1997 Humanist of the Year, and her poem “Be Nobody’s Darling” was previously the subject of the first Humanist small group reflection at Tufts in 2014.

This week, we’ll begin our meeting with her poem, “Expect Nothing,” a call for us in the modern age.