EthicalStL.org

Ethical Societies are not just welcoming communities for people from all walks of life and of many different beliefs: they are also com-munities that seek to make a difference. What difference have Ethical Societies made in the world, and how will we make a difference in the future?

It’s annual pledge time! Come hear about the state of the Ethical Society, the past year’s accomplishments and challenges, and how you can help keep the state of our union strong and growing.

Lecia Brooks leads the Southern Poverty Law Center’s outreach efforts on key initiatives and social justice issues. As outreach director, she frequently gives presentations around the country to promote tolerance and diversity. She also serves as director of the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery, Ala., an interpretive center designed to provide visitors to the Civil Rights Memorial with a deeper understanding of the civil rights movement. She joined the SPLC staff in 2004 as director of Mix It Up at Lunch Day, a Teaching Tolerance program designed to help break down racial, cultural and social barriers in schools. Previously, she worked for twelve years in a number of capacities for the National Conference for Community and Justice in its Los Angeles office. She is a graduate of Loyola Marymount University.

This presentation will explore the ethical obligations and value frameworks of public service. What makes an ideal public servant, and why is it such a hard job? How can we better understand the myriad, potentially conflicting values in the public sphere? What are the underlying public values that we all agree on? How do they come into conflict to create such strident disagreement? How can we create a consistent framework within which to place public values, and new tools with which to address conflicts between them?

Dr. Siewert is Director of the Center for Ethics in Public Life at the University of Missouri St. Louis. Prior to completing his PhD in Political Philosophy and Ethics at the University of California Santa Barbara, Dr. Siewert was Field Coordinator for the Citizen’s Action Coalition of Indiana and Campaign Manager and Program Coordinator for the Coalition for Consumer Justice in Providence, R.I. Having organized at the grassroots level, lobbied at the state level, and studied the political process from the academic point of view, Dr. Siewert seeks to illuminate the connection between the moral challenges individuals face in public service and the background principles and values of democratic governance that make public service such a unique, difficult, and vital human endeavor.

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We often think of “fairness” in terms of equality: if we treat people equally, then we are being fair. But this is not always the case. Some people, because they suffer from systemic disadvantages, need more than equal treatment in order to have a fair chance in society. This is the basis of affirmative action, which seeks to make up for a group’s disadvantages by going beyond equal treatment. Sometimes, equality is not enough.

The idea of a human community seems a simple one: we’re all human, after all, so don’t we all have common concerns? Yet recent decades have seen increasing emphasis on the uniqueness of individuals and the differences between groups of people. At a time of political polarization and increasing attention to the concerns of particular groups, can we find ways to assert that we are part of a human community, focusing on what we share while respecting the important differences between us?

Come learn how we are cooperating with the world community of humanism, through a report on recent developments at the Uganda Humanist Schools. The scholarship students we are supporting are growing into young women of strength and promise, and they have messages to share with us. Society Board President Ed Schmidt visited and taught at the schools this past summer and returned with new information and lots of great pictures!

One of the most valuable elements of fictional writing, such as dramatic literature and poetry, is that it enables audience members to make connections with their own lives. In looking at the situation or state of a character, we can safely begin to look deeper into ourselves, and to ask questions that would scare us if we were simply staring into the mirror. Through their work, poets and playwrights also remind us that we are not alone--people everywhere, every day, in both the past and present, experience the same feelings that we ourselves do. Actor and director Susan Kopp will perform a variety of dramatic literature and poetry to explore the themes of personal responsibility, regret, and gratitude.

Susan Kopp is a local actor, director, musician, and educator. She holds a BFA in Theatre from Stephens College in Columbia and has performed in numerous productions both locally and regionally. Susan has worked frequently with Metro Theater Company and since 2002 has been a Teaching Artist at COCA, teaching and directing for summer arts camps and after-school programs. This spring, Susan will direct “Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy” for COCA. Susan is most proud of her work with Interchange, which partners classroom teachers with teaching artists to integrate the arts into academic curriculum.

We often think of "responsibility" as a burden, something we take on grudgingly but don't really want. What if we thought of responsibility in terms of our ability to respond to life? What if we saw responsibility as liberating, as something to enjoy? If we embrace our response-ability we might discover that we have far more powerful than we ever knew...