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Avowed atheist adds another view to university's 26 chaplains and ministries
BY JOHN CHADWICK
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
The 26 chaplains and ministries at Rutgers University cover a wide spectrum of believers: Quakers, Jews, Christian evangelicals, and Buddhists, to name a few.
But even within that diverse group, Barry Klassel stands out.
Klassel, an avowed atheist, is the university's first humanist chaplain — and only the fourth on a college campus nationwide, he said.
"Secular humanists don't look to gods or the afterlife or the spirit world for understanding, strength, or support," Klassel said in a recent interview. "We look for understanding in the world itself. And we look for support from each other."
The university's Religious Life Council approved the new chaplaincy last spring after Gary Brill, an instructor in the Department of Psychology, expressed interest in starting a campus organization for humanists. Brill said he believes there are significant numbers of students who, while not necessarily card-carrying humanists, hold some of the key convictions of the movement."I didn't find out about humanist groups until my 30s," said Brill, who serves on the board of the New Jersey Humanist Network. "I was so thrilled to find out that there were groups of people who identified as humanists, who supported each other and exchanged ideas."
Humanists believe that people can lead ethical lives and work for the greater good of society without God or other supernatural beliefs. Humanists typically respect science — there are a number of humanist events marking the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin — and place great value on nature, reason and personal integrity in human relationships.
Humanists are frequently liberals. The American Humanist Association opposed a recent amendment to bring back federal funding for abstinence-only education.
Brill said he expressed his interest in a campus group to staffers at Rutgers University Student Life, who suggested a chaplaincy.
"Rutgers has been completely supportive," he said.
He then asked Klassel, a certified humanist celebrant who performs weddings and other life cycle events, to serve as volunteer chaplain.
Klassel, who has a bachelor's degree in psychology from Columbia University, and a master's degree in theater from the University of Pittsburgh, grew up in a Jewish household and gravitated to Humanism in college.
"It started with a sincere effort to try to understand what it is that human beings can know and cannot know," he said. "My conclusion was that this world is something we can know while the spirit world is something we cannot really know.
"Why not pay attention to what we can know?"
Klassel, among other things, has acted and directed professionally, served handicapped adults as a rehabilitation counselor, and worked as a facilitator with the Teen and Child Assault Prevention Programs.
As a chaplain, Klassel said he would draw on Humanist principles of compassion and respect rather than prayer and belief in God.
"What's extremely important is compassion, the compassion of another human being who goes through issues, who has difficulties," he said. "That kind of connection from one human being to another is just as powerful as any other type of connection."
Klassel holds regular meetings on campus that are open to the public.
On October 29, Greg Epstein, the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University, and the author of the book Good without God? will speak at Hickman Hall on the Douglass Campus.
For more information, check www.rutgershumanist.org
