Tom Murphy
RedwoodAge.com

As the 78 million boomers age, many of them are showing a new interest in the spiritual side of lfie, but not all are finding it in a church.

A fast-growing monthly podcast, produced by the Institute for Humanist Studies,  is targeting this group with a monthly show about "reason and compassion without belief in God."

"This isn't radio evangelism in reverse," said Duncan Crary, co-host of the Humanist Monthly News. "We don't deliver atheist sermons and we don't proselytize. But we do interview some of the best minds of our day about religion, ethics and culture. And most of our guests openly identify as humanists or atheists."

Crary hopes the show will introduce humanism to the 30 million Americans who are estimated to have no religion.

Topics range from politics to pop culture, with guests like author Salman Rushdie, ethologist Richard Dawkins, writer Sam Harris and comedienne Julia Sweeney. The show recently interviewed Greg Graffin, the lead singer of the punk bank Bad Religion, after he received the lifetime achievement award from the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard.

"We're dealing with heavy topics like atheism, bioethics and the separation of religion and government," Crary said. "But we also have a laid back humorous side, too." 

Crary and co-host Jes Constantine use portable gear to record interviews on the fly, catching lawyer Alan Dershowitz on a staircase, author Christopher Hitchens in a bar and folk singer Holly Near in an alley. The show has also traveled to India and Belgium to interview humanist students there.

"A lot of podcasts feature hard-to-hear phone interviews," Crary said. "But we're out there interviewing people in person. The sound quality is better and it's more fun for the listeners because they feel like we're taking them along with us."

About 10,000 listeners download the show each month, but the audience is growing with support from the American Humanist Association, which just adopted it as the group's "official podcast." The group, founded in 1941, has 100 chapters nationally with more than 10,000 members. 

"We could have just created our own podcast," said AHA Executive Director Roy Speckhardt. "In the past, freethinkers and their organizations have been fiercely independent. But partnerships like this one are becoming more common, and they demonstrate a willingness among nonreligious Americans to work together on shared goals and to show their strength in numbers."