Weekly Newsletter from Christian Vegetarian Association CVA - June 14, 2025
From Christian Vegetarian Association (CVA)

  1. Meeting the Moment: Reimagining Education for a Better World
    📅 Wednesday, June 18
  2. Anne Frank part 3: Are People Good at Heart?
  3. All-Creatures.Org newsletter 6/11/25

1. Meeting the Moment: Reimagining Education for a Better World
📅 Wednesday, June 18

🕐 1:00 PM ET - LIVE

https://mailchi.mp/humaneeducation/meeting-the-moment

Leaders from the Institute for Humane Education will talk about how we can rise to meet this moment of educational uncertainty—and how solutionary learning offers a path forward.

You'll have a chance to ask questions, chat live with the community, and help reimagine what's possible for students, teachers, and the future of humane education.

Register here and send in your questions: https://mailchi.mp/humaneeducation/meeting-the-moment

2. Anne Frank part 3: Are People Good at Heart?

I would like to continue to reflect on this passage from Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl:

"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again."

This week, I would like to consider the question of whether people are really good at heart. I think almost all of us have the potential to be kind and compassionate, but the capacity for callousness and cruelty also seems universal. From an evolutionary standpoint, there is selective advantage for those who help relatives, who to varying degrees share their genes. There would seem to be little genetic advantage to make sacrifices for distant relatives, however, and genetics that encourage acting with universal compassion would be less likely to pass from one generation to the next. Consequently, from an evolutionary perspective, it is remarkable that people often have compassion for humans who are not relatives and even for nonhumans. I suspect that this is related to our distinctive (but by no means unique) human capacities for empathy with the experiences of others.

If we have such empathetic capabilities, why have humans perpetrated horrific acts of cruelty such as the Holocaust that victimized Anne Frank, the Rwandan genocide, and the countless acts of violence of cruelty, large and small, that have caused great suffering throughout history? Many people who hurt others have been hurt themselves, often during childhood, which tends to be the most impressionable time of life. Many people, feeling vulnerable to injury and death and anxious about their own inevitable mortality, seek power over others to assuage their anxieties. Further, many people are attracted to and manifest a blind faith in dogmas that reduce their existential fears, particularly fears related to their mortality. Those dogmas can be religious or secular. What they have in common is a promise of transcendence from mundane concerns and giving people a sense of eternal meaning to their lives.

While I don't share Anne's view that humans are good at heart, I don't think humans are fundamentally evil, either. Anne anticipated her own death in a world ravaged by war, but she believed that peace would ultimately prevail. Was such a hope reasonable? If not, what should compassionate people who seek peace do?

Stephen R. Kaufman, MD

3. All-Creatures.Org newsletter 6/11/25

We hope you enjoy this week's newsletter and also find useful tools in all we share. There is always so very much to share including:

Coping with cat torture video news - striving for pet-inclusive housing - remembering the influential documentary Meet Your Meat - preparing your animal companions for emergencies - interview with the Imperfect Hippie - Over gentle earth [new poem from J.H. Dickinson] - veganism is so much more than a diet - thousands of chicks die in U.S. postal truck - having doubts after rescuing a feral cat - and more...

https://all-creatures.org/newsletter/news-20250611.html

Do you have things that you would like to see included in future newsletters? Then send it to us at maddie@all-creatures.org.

In the Love of the Lord,
Frank L. Hoffman
and
Kindness,
Tams Nicholson

2025 Newsletters Archive