EthicalStL.org

This will be an exploration of the constraints we all face in life and how these constraints determine, at least in part, who we become and shape our characters. It will also look at how we can expand our options and live fully ethical and meaningful lives.lt;brgt;lt;brgt;Jim Rhodes has been an active member of the Ethical Society for 18 years and is married to member Stephanie Sigala. Jim is an environmental engineer and works for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. He enjoys outdoor activities and also photography, music, vegetarian cooking, and dancing with Stephanie. Jim has served on the Board and is a member of the Finance Committee.

Gateway Greening established more than 170 community gardens on abandoned land in the City's urban core. These gardens provide food for the table and food for the soul, serve as safe places to gather and are often the only asset in threatened neighborhoods. Learn how groups gather around these projects and the impact these gardens have on their lives. lt;brgt;lt;brgt;For the last 13 years, Gwenne Hayes-Stewart has served as the executive director of Gateway Greening, the non-profit community gardening organization in St. Louis. During her tenure, the organization developed from a small non-profit serving a few hundred people working in 30 community gardens into one serving over 2,800 people working in more than 170 community gardens, neighborhood greening projects, and citizen-managed open spaces. She is a Master Gardener who founded the Great Perennial Divide in 1998. She has been a Rotarian for 18 years. She serves on the advisory board of the Horticulture Department, St. Louis Community College at Meramec and Board Secretary of the American Community Gardening Association. Among her awards are two national recognitions, The American Horticulture Society's Urban Beautification Award and the National Garden Club's Award of Excellence.

Hostels, hostelling, and hostel programs create world class citizens who are culturally sensitive. World Travel 101, an educational program, will demonstrate this. lt;brgt;lt;brgt;Mark T. Cockson is the executive director of the Gateway Council of Hostelling International-USA. Mark has a background in teaching, social work and administration in the not-for-profit world. Mark has a love for travel and nature that he expresses through gardening and photography.

This platform address will explore the movement to local foods that led the New Oxford American Dictionary to christen as its "new word of 2007" the word "locovore." This movement has developed tremendous momentum solely due to grassroots interest - without the help of politicians, lobbyists or corporate sponsors - because it just makes so darn much sense to so many Americans. Eating local presents people with the opportunity to improve the environment, support hard-working farmers and take an ethical stand against the pervasiveness of commercialism in American life while enjoying a healthier lifestyle and the best tasting food available anywhere.lt;brgt;lt;brgt;Andy Ayers and his wife, Paula, owned and operated Riddle's Restaurant in Bel Nor where they began featuring locally grown ingredients on the menu in the early 1980's. The couple opened Riddle's Penultimate Café and Wine Bar in the University City Loop in 1985 and ran it for 23 years before selling the restaurant to their daughter, KT, who operates it now. lt;brgt;lt;brgt;An advocate, writer and speaker on behalf of local foods and local growers, Andy received the Lewis C. Green Environmental Service Award in 2006 for his work. Since leaving the restaurant to the next generation, Andy is growing a new start-up business that distributes food directly from local farms to the best restaurant kitchens in the St. Louis area.

A poem is sculpted on the page. The words, punctuation, and the line direct us to the music of the poem, but it’s what the poem is wrapped in, perhaps skims or floats over, the white of the page, that silence that lies behind the poem that gives voice and power to the poem itself. Is there an inherent ethic to be distilled from this silence? And what part does imagination play in this tango between the poem and the page, between the poem and silence? Does the poetic imagination create the world, and if so, has imagination failed us? There will be more questions than answers - as e.e. cummings wrote: always the beautiful answer/that asks the more question.lt;brgt;lt;brgt; Walter Bargen has published eleven books of poetry and two chapbooks. The latest are: The Feast, BkMk Press-UMKC, 2004, a series of prose poems, winner of the 2005 William Rockhill Nelson Award; Remedies for Vertigo (2006) from WordTech Communications; and West of West from Timberline Press (2007). Theban Traffic is scheduled for publication in May of 2008. His poems have recently appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, New Letters, Poetry East, and the Seattle Review. He was appointed to be the ' poet laureate of Missouri in 2008.

Artist Phyllis Plattner will discuss the path that led to her recent multiple panel paintings which are as yet still untitled. Based loosely on an altarpiece format they grapple with the stunning contrasts among opposing aspects of human behavior: the tragically ubiquitous habit of making war and the universal urge for beauty, spirituality, and love.lt;brgt;lt;brgt;Phyllis Plattner was born and grew up in New York City and greatly benefitted from that geographic happenstance by the easy access to the great museums of the city. It was while standing in front of a Van Gogh and a Gaugin at the Museum of Modern Art at about age eight that she realized for sure that she wanted to be an artist when she grew up. Since then she has never stopped painting, through college at Bennington in Vermont, and graduate school in Claremont, California, and all through her teaching career at Washington University School of Fine Arts (which it was then called), at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, (which is now called MICA) where she still teaches, and in Florence, Italy. She has exhibited her work in various galleries and university museums in this country, and in small exhibits in Italy and France.

Professor Kurtzman will inaugurate the June Arts and Ethics platform series by exploring the relationship between music and ethics. From early Chinese, Persian, and Greek times, music has been thought to have powerful effects on human beings and capable of contributing either to their improvement or degradation, i.e., to have ethical consequences. Professor Kurtz-man's talk will examine both the history and prevalence of such ideas and the reality of the impact of music in an effort to evaluate the validity of such ideas and understand the role music plays or could play in modern society.lt;brgt;lt;brgt;Jeffrey Kurtzman earned his Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He was one of the founding faculty of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University and is Professor of Music and former Chair of the Department of Music at Washington University. A specialist in 16th- and 17th-century Italian music, he has published books and articles on Claudio Monteverdi and other Italian composers, as well as numerous editions of music by Monteverdi and others from the same period.lt;brgt;lt;brgt;He was the founder of the international "Society for Seventeenth-Century Music" and is a member of the editorial boards of the Society's publications. Prof. Kurtzman's research has been supported by the John Simon Guggen-heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austaushdi-enst, as well as grants from Middlebury College, Rice University, Washing-ton University, and the University of Venice. Professor Kurtzman has performed at the piano several times for Ethical Society platforms and has given two lecture-recitals for the Ethical Society this year.

Come hear a platform about the past, present, and future of Ethical Culture membership growth. Members of the Future of Ethical Societies Liz Mulhall, Tara Klein, and Matt Herndon as well as the Membership Director at the Ethical Society of St. Louis, Evan Gross, will be presenting their ideas in a three-part plat-form. Tara is a member of the Ethical Humanist Society of Long Island and she recently completed her thesis on Ethical Culture history at Vassar College. Matt is a professional web designer in the Washington, DC area and will talk about the role of technology in Ethical Culture membership growth. Evan will talk about how the St. Louis Society is expanding its out-reach.

Mother's Day was originally "Mother's Day for Peace," and this Sunday we will celebrate and explore the original roots of the holiday as an antiwar movement that sought to bring women together as ethical community leaders. But the inspiration for this platform is mostly personal. The role of mothers (and "mothering" caretakers of either sex) in building strong communities and teaching ethical values is often overlooked, as I have learned from watching the struggle of my mother and many women of her generation to feel valued in a status-conscious society. Many things have changed over the years, and women have more choices and opportunities than ever before in history, yet questions of identity, worth, and what it means to be a good citizen are as vital as ever.

I like periodically to update and present some of the great wisdom from our past. We need to know history in order not to repeat it, or not to have to re-invent it; there is a lot of historical thought that is surprisingly relevant to today. Unfortunately, that thinking can lose its power over the years due to changes in language and communication styles. lt;brgt;lt;brgt;This Sunday we will explore the central ideas in "A Common Faith," a seminal work on religious humanism by famous American philosopher John Dewey, who while not a member of an Ethical Society had close ties with our movement. His ideas were radical in his day, and remain radical in ours, and I will do my best to translate them into modern language so that they may re-inspire a new generation. lt;brgt;lt;brgt;"The religious is any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of its general and enduring value." - John Dewey