Dr. Joseph Chuman Receives the Felix Adler Lifetime Achievement Award
The American Ethical Union will present Dr. Joseph Chuman with its highest honor within the Ethical Culture Movement - The Felix Adler Lifetime Achievement Award. This award is given in recognition for an individual’s lifetime of dedication to creating, nurturing, and inspiring ethical humanist communities to foster a world that is democratic, compassionate, just, and sustainable. Dr. Chuman recently retired as Leader from the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County after 46 years of service and continues to serve as a Leader for the New York Society for Ethical Culture.
As Dr. Chuman will readily inform you, his work as an Ethical Culture Leader has been inseparable from his life. In his last address as Leader of the Bergen Ethical Society, in December 2020, he said, “My engagement with the Society has enabled me to be who I am in ways that have mattered most. I have long believed that work is the primary medium through which a person engages the world. And in the process of that expression one molds his or her character, unfolds one’s potential while being guided and inspired by dreams and aspirations….My choice to devote myself to Ethical Culture leadership has been for me the most fruitful environment imaginable by which to realize this philosophy and become who I am….Humanism is not merely a philosophy but a lived experience.”
Dr. Chuman did the important, day-to-day work of providing the community with a strong sense of purpose and dependable administration. His leadership shaped the Society into one that empowered, enlightened, inspired, and often comforted its members. “What Joe has brought forth takes place in our minds, our actions, and in our hearts,” says Janet Glass, longtime member and former president of the Bergen Society. “It sweeps us to higher ground. It is his enduring legacy.”
Dr. Chuman’s humanism as a lived experience was evident across the years in his activism. This took many forms, including groundbreaking work with the Bergen chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union on the separation of church and state and with the Bergen County Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence. He also founded the Northern New Jersey Sanctuary Coalition to aid political asylum-seekers and chaired both Amnesty International USA’s Committee on the Death Penalty in the late 1970s and the New Jersey Coalition Against the Death Penalty in the early 1980s. His activism, his writing, and his teaching at the Center for Human Rights at Columbia University continue to bolster the fight for human rights. Dr. Chuman’s legacy as a voice for Ethical Culture continues in his writing. In the local and national media, he has addressed major issues of our time, including racism, gun violence, church-state separation, and the plight of refugees and asylum-seekers. In his books, Dr. Chuman examines violence committed in the name of religion, what a humanist politics would look like, and the connection between science and democracy. The 2013 book, Speaking of Ethics, includes some two dozen of the many addresses he delivered at the Ethical Society on the first Sunday of the month. For his readers and listeners, these lectures were riveting talks on philosophy, ethics, current events, the human condition, and human behavior. As he himself said, “I have always taken my commitment to the Sunday morning address very seriously. In the mind of our founder, Felix Adler, and in mine as well, it is the central defining activity of Ethical Culture. It is the experience that expresses what we are and the occasion from which our message goes forth…I recoil at the idea of giving talks that are simplistic, platitudinous, or dopey, or strive to uplift the emotions while being devoid of intellectual content. Ideas matter.”
These ideas include race relations, the survival of democracy, the dangers of anti-intellectualism, fighting despair during the pandemic, attaining strength through the human bond, the power of taking action, and the humanist response to life’s unfairness. Dr. Chuman wrote his Columbia PhD dissertation on Ethical Culture founder Felix Adler and on Theodore Parker, the Unitarian theologian, scholar, and social reformer. The study of Adler bestowed him with a deep, philosophical grasp of Ethical Culture’s founder, informing his work for the next five decades. In the mold of Felix Adler, he made a connection between the essential beliefs of Ethical Culture and the social-justice work he undertook in the community.
We are grateful to Dr. Chuman for his work as an Ethical Culture Leader; as a colleague, mentor, and friend to fellow Leaders; and as a champion of Ethical Culture values in the world. His legacy will long inspire us.
Previous recipients of the Felix Adler Lifetime Achievement Award include:
2011: Dr. Howard B. Radest, for over seven decades of active involvement in the Ethical Culture Movement, during which time he served as a Leader, educator, and author 2010: Rose L. Walker, for her extraordinary volunteerism and her intrepid spirit in promoting a long-standing and close mutual relationship between the American Ethical Union and the United Nations. 2019: Edward L. Ericson for growing the Ethical Culture Movement and influencing the broader humanist movement through his writings, lobbying, and collaboration with other Leaders.