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Platform addresses on ethical topics and issues recorded live from the Ethical Society of St. Louis. These lectures cover a number of areas including ethics, religion, values, and humanism. To discuss our podcasts please visit us on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/EthicalSocietySTL
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Life is far too weird and wonderful to be boiled down to one single note. In order to really appreciate it, you need to be willing to explore its countless instruments and hear its many melodies. In this dynamic and unforgettable presentation, you get to learn surprisingly detailed science lessons all while enjoying the incredible symphony that is biology.
Join us for a timely and grounding conversation on immigration, enforcement, and ethical responsibility. As public attention intensifies around ICE activity and immigration policy in the United States, it can be difficult to separate fear from fact. Drawing on her work supporting immigrant communities in St. Louis, Mirka will offer context on what is happening right now, how immigration enforcement impacts real families and neighborhoods, and what it means to respond with integrity rather than panic. This talk will focus on truth-seeking through lived experience, evidence, and ethical reflection. Mirka will invite us to consider how communities can act as informed and compassionate allies by centering dignity, clarity, and shared responsibility in moments of uncertainty.
A Review of long term sustainability goals, how we get there, our values and choices, and what membership means.
Magicians can perform seemingly impossible feats. Objects appear and disappear, change and transform. But how do these things happen? Zi teaches the science of how our senses really work, and how the work of magicians exposes the flaws in our perception that are normally invisible to us in everyday life.
In this powerful and timely talk, Christi Griffin, J.D., founder president of The Ethics Project, explores the quiet progression from indifference to injustice -and how the erosion of fairness in one arena inevitably seeps into all others. Drawing on decades of experience addressing systemic inequities and wrongful prosecutions, Griffin reflects on the moral and civic costs of apathy in the face of injustice. What began as the targeting of others has now reached into every corner of society -from the closing of rural hospitals and family farms to the rollback of educational opportunities and personal freedoms. Through this urgent lens, she challenges audiences to recognize the warning signs of authoritarian drift and to reclaim the courage to care, to speak, and to act before silence becomes complicity.
Sometimes we imagine truth as the result of a contest of ideas. In the "marketplace of ideas", we tell ourselves, the best truths win. But truths are not singular things like products vying for our attention, and the epistemic landscape we inhabit is not like a supermarket or online shopping portal. Rather, truth is the result of collective effort, and flourishes only in the right environment: truth grows in a garden we tend together.
Most of us have experienced a misalignment of emotion and logic when it comes to our search for truth. Maybe it's that friend who's highly educated but easily pulled into conspiracy theories. Maybe it's our own feelings of getting swept up in panic we know isn't rooted in fact. Or maybe it's the collective despair of witnessing mis- and disinformation sweep an entire nation. However it manifests, we know that this misalignment often keeps us stuck, separating us from truth. If we seek true social change, the kind that moves people and communities out of being stuck and into alignment, we must understand the relationship between logic and emotion.
We will provide an overview of Ethical Society of St Louis' history of support for humanist schools in Uganda in cooperation with the Uganda Humanist Schools Trust (UHST), then updates on progress and challenges at the schools during the past year, then finish with a call for our community to continue our support for the students and schools in the upcoming year.
In today's attention economy, where people focus shapes daily life and the wider culture. This talk will examine how Humanists can treat attention as a sacred resource. Creative Director Louise Jett will pair reflection with practice. Participants will be invited to turn scattered attention into deliberate care, because what we look at, shapes us; and what we tend together, we can shape.
The New Atheists became popular at a time when books could captivate a country. That time is long gone. While some politicians and powerful religious groups have adapted to a new era of media, secular organizations and people have not. Let's talk about what needs to change in our community and how all of us can play a part in that.=
How does our conceptualization of health reflect or deny the inherent worth and dignity of all people? What does it mean to engage in democracy when definitions of health are being narrowed while access to meaningful health-care is being degraded? What roots should we be aware of in discussions of public health? Are some more in line with our values than others? Join us to explore the intersections of health, worth, and democracy in modern US society.
Music is more than entertainment it's a lifeline. In this heartfelt, interactive talk and live performance, Lynn O'Brien explores how music supports our health, relationships, and sense of meaning in everyday life. Drawing from her years as a board-certified music therapist and professional artist, she shares real stories and songs that reveal how music can calm, connect, and carry us through change. This is an invitation to listen differently, to notice how music meets us right where we are, and how it can help us stay grounded, creative, and connected in a noisy world.
My presentation centers on the book, which I wrote in conjunction with the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, on the history of Black Baseball in America. The book accompanies the Hall of Fame's new exhibit on Black baseball which opened in May 2024. I worked as a consultant on the exhibit and will discuss the development of the exhibit as well as the process of writing the book.
Music has always been a force for justice—giving voice to struggle, inspiring resilience, and building solidarity across movements. Join us for a moving Platform experience with Dr. Lauren Eldridge Stewart, assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Washington University.
In this presentation Geoff Ward discusses efforts of Community Remembrance Projects across the U.S. and here in MO working with Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) to address legacies of lynching. He will briefly discuss the large body of social science research showing how histories of lynching contribute to enduring patterns of conflict, violence, and inequality, in part through their distortions of the moral universe and corruption of the rule of law. Community Remembrance efforts aim to leverage the “power of us” to repair these harms, elevating the plane of civil and human rights in places where it was degraded by histories of lynching. The St. Louis Community Remembrance Project is unveiling St. Louis’ first EJI historical marker Oct. 18 in Buder Park and will next turn its attention to installing a second marker commemorating the 1836 lynching of Francis McIntosh in downtown St. Louis. Members of the Ethical Society of St. Louis have been involved in our local efforts since their inception, and all are welcome to join.
Looking at the poetry of W. H. Auden and the writing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and attempting to form a relationship between the two. We’ll be talking about how we can support efforts for liberation on the terms of the people who are working to be liberated. We’ll also take a look at some classical works of art and wondering what clues they can offer us about working for more love and justice in our world.
Looking at the poetry of W. H. Auden and the writing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and attempting to form a relationship between the two. We’ll be talking about how we can support efforts for liberation on the terms of the people who are working to be liberated. We’ll also take a look at some classical works of art and wondering what clues they can offer us about working for more love and justice in our world.
Hear a special panel highlighting the voices of our lay leaders — members who help guide and sustain the Society’s programs, initiatives, and community life. Together they will reflect on what leadership means in our values-driven community, how their experiences embody our mission of inspiring ethical living and working for a more just world, and why shared leadership is central to our success. Panelists will also share some of their most formative experiences at the Ethical Society and discuss ways they believe our organization can continue to improve and evolve into the future.
At a time when fear and division threaten democracy, Humanism offers a different path, one rooted in dignity, truth, and solidarity. This Platform will explore how Humanist values can inspire hope and guide us to resist authoritarianism, defend human rights, and strengthen our communities with courage and compassion. Let’s reflect on how “Humanism in Action” can be our most powerful response to rising fascism.
Celebrate books and how all varieties of fiction are important to surviving and thriving in the modern world. Reading fiction serves a wide variety of purposes – including some that may surprise you. This goes for not just “serious” literary fiction, but popular genres like romance and mystery.
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