Podcasts
Recordings of Sunday Platform addresses
What does it mean to have dignity, and how can we respect the dignity of others? We can get a window into what it means to have dignity by looking at forms of dehumanization, times when people have had their dignity stripped from them – then try to do the opposite, and humanize them instead.
In a world-culture that seems fascinated with communication and intersectionality, this reflection invites us to step back from our fast-paced cadence of life in order to examine more intentionally how human relationships and the desire for the common good demand greater self-awareness (honesty) and vulnerability (personal risk).
Javier Orozco is Executive Director of Intercultural and Interreligious Affairs for the Archdiocese of St. Louis, overseeing the Office of Hispanic Ministry and the Office of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs.
Drawing from his experience working across lines of religious difference, in this Platform Address he will share his experiences and thoughts on how we can build relationships with those who believe differently.
Personal caregiving at home for family and friends used to be the only option for those who need extra assistance or help, whether temporarily or for life. Today there are professional options for caregiving both for services and housing, yet there are many ethical dilemmas involved in decisions about care: issues of cost and time, of fairness and priorities, increasingly of balancing multiple caregiving responsibilities. How should we approach such difficult and often heart-wrenching questions?
For this, the second part of our annual Pledge Sunday Platforms, prepare to go big picture. We’ll explore where we seem to be going as a species, analyzing some of the challenges facing human beings as we approach the third decade of the third millennium; and we’ll ask where we are going as an Ethical Society, outlining some of the things we’d like to achieve and how we hope to achieve them.
It’s pledge time! Time to kick off the Ethical Society’s annual pledge campaign. This year’s campaign theme, “We Are the Ethical Society,” will highlight and share stories of members and remind us that it is individuals that together create a community and an institution. We will emphasize the humans in Ethical Humanism. Come learn more about this past year’s accomplishments, plans for the future, and how together we are the Ethical Society. Plus, hear the announcement of the fundraising total for the Uganda Humanist Schools project!
Jason Purnell is Associate Professor at the Brown School of Washington University. His research focuses on how socioeconomic and sociocultural factors influence health behaviors and health outcomes and on mobilizing community action to address the social determinants of health. He currently leads Health Equity Works, the new name and expanded mission of the Brown School initiative previously referred to as For the Sake of All, which the Ethical Society learned about in a two-part Forum last month.
We all need support sometimes. Life doesn’t always go to plan, and when things fall apart, we need people we can turn to for help. But it can be difficult to ask for help: we fear the vulnerability of admitting we need support, or we may not have anyone in our lives we can trust with our weakness. How can we get better at asking for support when we need it, and how can we build a community that supports each other through life?
In 1994 Bob Hansman began City Faces for children in Clinton-Peabody Public Housing, then something of a hotbed of Bloods (and Crips) activity. In 1996 he opened a studio there, which has by now been populated by two generations of kids in the projects as well as hundreds of Washington University volunteers. In 2002 he adopted his son Jovan; the two of them have been the subject of national television and magazine coverage and the recipients of numerous awards. In 2017 Bob and Jovan illustrated a book of poems about immigration—Traveling the Blue Road: Poems of the Sea, which has won recognition from the National Associations of Teachers of English and Social Studies.
Bob Hansman is a child of the sixties. He got to meet Coretta Scott King and Julian Bond, and was sitting just yards from Bobby Kennedy when he announced his run for the presidency. He also got beat up (and his lawyer’s office got pipe-bombed) by the Ku Klux Klan. Years later he began teaching at both Washington University and the Clinton-Peabody housing projects. Those two threads have been weaving in and out ever since. In 2017 he published a book about Pruitt-Igoe. Locally, Bob has received a Rosa Parks Award and a Dred Scott Freedom Award from Dred and Harriet Scott’s great-great-granddaughter.
For millennia, the idea that human beings have a supernatural “soul”—a spirit inside us which is more than simply matter—has played a central role in religious and spiritual traditions. But even if, like many Humanists, you do not believe that you have a literal “soul,” you might still use the word in a metaphorical sense, or talk about “soul music” or “soul food.” What do these words mean, then, and what might an Ethical Humanist understanding of “soul” look like? How can we feed our Ethical Humanist “souls”?
Come hear and see what’s going on with the Uganda Humanist Schools and how the Ethical Society is helping Ugandan humanists transform young lives and lift up an entire community.
View the slides from this platform (pdf)
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