After over fifty years as an Ethical Culture Leader, Dr. Joe Chuman joined us to give his final Sunday Platform.

Joe Chuman: ‘My Life in Ethical Culture: Reflections on the Movement I Have Loved and People I Have Known’

I will give my final address, this Sunday, as an Ethical Society leader. It marks the end of a vocational commitment that has spanned more than 55 years. It has been a long and rich career.

I began my professional work here at the New York Society as a trainee in 1969. Over the decades I served as a leader of the Essex Society in Maplewood, New Jersey, and most extensively with the Bergen Society in Teaneck for 46 years, returning to work part-time at New York in 2008.

My commitment to Ethical Culture has been far more than even a career. It has been engagement to which I have given my best self. I have striven to live out Ethical Culture’s most important values around which I have molded my character. Its humanism has been my life’s philosophy which has been a source of meaning and purpose. There has been little distance between my work and my life lived.

I intend this final platform to be a personal one. I want to share how I have understood Ethical Culture as a source of life’s meaning. I also want to reflect on some of the outstanding people who have been significant figures here at the New York Society and have been formative influences on my life and career.

I also want to look ahead to briefly reflect on what the New York Society needs to do in these very challenging times to better fulfill its mission.

And finally, as I say goodbye, I wish to use this opportunity to thank those members who have extended to me their great kindness and support, which will be a source of ongoing gratitude and fond memories that I will carry with me in the years ahead.

About Joe Chuman

Leader Dr. Joe Chuman started on his road to Ethical Leadership as a leader-in-Training here at the New York Society in 1969 and continued his training at the Bergen Society, after which he became Leader of the Essex County Society before returning to the Bergen Society, where he served as leader for 46 years, retiring in January 2021. Joe has been a leader at the New York Society Since 2008. During his long career, Joe has worked as an academic, a social justice activist, a speaker, and a writer. He has been teaching human rights in the Graduate School at Columbia University for more than 20 years, teaches human rights at Hunter College, and has taught at the U. N. University for Peace in Costa Rica and at other colleges.

As an activist, Joe has advocated for civil liberties, human rights, and other progressive causes and has frequently testified before the New Jersey legislature on such issues as religious freedom, gun violence prevention, death penalty opposition, and immigrant rights. He founded the Northern New Jersey Coalition for Asylum Seekers 20 years ago and still serves as its president. Joe has written numerous book chapters, encyclopedia entrees, scores of Op-eds, and is the author of “Speaking of Ethics,” a compilation of essays on Ethical Culture. Currently, he writes articles on political and socio-political issues on Substack and other social media outlets.