The British Humanist Association has today announced that Professor Ted Cantle will deliver the Blackham Lecture 2017, on the evening of 31 March, in Birmingham.
His talk, titled ‘Will hate and fear trump hope and acceptance?’, will examine the role humanists can play in promoting tolerance and keeping communities together at a time of great social division. It follows on from the grassroots #LoveYourNeighbour campaign kicked off by Birmingham Humanists after a spike in the number of reported hate crimes in England since the summer.
Ted Cantle established the former Institute of Community Cohesion (iCoCo) in 2005 and this became the UK’s leading authority on community cohesion and intercultural relations. This work is continued by the iCoCo Foundation today.
The Blackham Lecture is a new addition to the BHA’s annual lecture series, and is hosted in association with Birmingham Humanists, who previously organised the event independently. It joins the Darwin Day Lectures, the Rosalind Franklin Lecture, the Voltaire Lecture, the Holyoake Lecture, the Bentham Lecture, and the Shelley Lecture – all named for well-known figures in the history of humanist thought in Britain.
Tickets cost £12.50 for the general public and £10 for BHA members and students. You can get yours at humanists.uk/blackham2017.
Notes
The British Humanist Association (BHA) is the national charity working on behalf of non-religious people who seek to live ethical and fulfilling lives on the basis of reason and humanity.
The Blackham Lecture is named after Harold Blackham, an ‘architect of the British and international humanist movements’ and founder of the British Humanist Association.
In August 2001, Cantle was appointed by the Home Secretary to Chair the Community Cohesion Review Team and to lead the review of the causes of the summer disturbances in a number of northern towns and cities. The groundbreaking report – known as ‘the Cantle Report’ – was produced in December 2001 and made around 70 recommendations. It also created the concept of ‘parallel lives’ to describe communities that had little in common and had no contact with each other, challenging the multicultural orthodoxy and giving birth to the idea of ‘community cohesion’.