Hugh Taft-Morales Leader, Philadelphia Ethical Society How can we overcome the divisiveness tearing at the fabric of our communities, especially surrounding racism and oppression? Martin Luther King, Jr. proposed an answer: “the beloved community,” founded on economic and social justice. Although not unachievable, King’s vision demands daily work and inner discipline to remove the roadblocks [...]

Amy Sinden Professor of Law, Temple University Climate and equity are inextricably linked. The climate crisis is both driving and driven by increasing disparities of wealth, income, power, and privilege and threatens to drive similar inequities across generations. The global scale of these twin crises can overwhelm us. But a focus on the local aspects [...]

Signe Wilkinson Political cartoonist Wilkinson will share the highs and the this-is-a-new-low-in-journalism-how-dare-you-publish-it!s of her nearly 40-year career chronicling local and national politics for the Philadelphia Daily News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. In 2021, she illustrated the book Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn, written by Penn’s Jonathan Zimmerman. Wilkinson will display her [...]

Hugh Taft-Morales Leader, Philadelphia Ethical Society In two nonconsecutive terms as mayor of Bogota, Columbia, starting in 1995, Antanas Mockus used non-traditional cultural and creative methods to induce positive social change. From hiring mimes to improve crosswalk safety to melting down guns to make baby spoons, Mockus motivated and unified his constituents. Today, when the [...]

Casarae Abdul-Ghani Assistant Professor of English, Temple University Abdul-Ghani will explore the legacy of 1960s civil unrest as captured by the contemporaneous Black Arts Movement (BAM) in drama, fiction, and poetry. BAM forged new conversations about the union of art, activism, and social justice; it also centralized the African American perspective in narrative. In the [...]

Hugh Taft-Morales Leader, Philadelphia Ethical Society After the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln hoped to bind the nation’s wounds. “Let ’em up easy,” he told the Union Army, trying to discourage retribution. But following the President’s assassination, the federal government, in alliance with formerly enslaved people, radically reconstructed the South, enfranchising and electing Black Americans. Then [...]

From the all AEU Program recorded on January 30, 2022 Special guest Dennis D. Parker of the National Center for Law and Economic Justice presents a speech that civil rights' icon W.E.B. Du Bois gave to the NYSEC in 1949. Join here online at the scheduled time: tiny.cc/pesprograms

Hugh Taft-Morales Leader, Philadelphia Ethical Society What is forgiveness? How should humanists approach forgiveness so that it elevates our quality of life and strengthens our commitment to ethical living? Felix Adler wrote that “to forgive is not to forget—quite the contrary. To forgive is to remember the past action, but to remember it as belonging [...]

Marisa Fuentes Rutgers University Historical and contemporary records are consistently unreliable for understanding Black lives in precarity. Historian Marisa Fuentes will consider the ethics of historical research into vulnerable subjects by analyzing a document from the Barbados colonial slave archives alongside the police investigation into the killing of Breonna Taylor. She also will offer ethical [...]

Hugh Taft-Morales Leader, Philadelphia Ethical Society Animals have long supported human life, from their non-consensual role in our diets to their loving place in our homes. Humans often go to great lengths to care for them: rescuing wild animals in distress or feeding feral ones. Hugh will share two stories—one about dogs and one about [...]