• ESWoW Community Call - Starting 2013 Together
• From The Leader - 50 Years since the March on Washington
• Around the Movement - Bart Worden, How Our Commitments Bring Ethics to Life
• Ethical Action - What are you doing for the MLK Day of Service?

ESWoW Community Call, Sunday, January 13, 2013
5pm Pacific, 6pm Mountain, 7pm Central, and 8pm Eastern
866-744-1260 access code 5766842#

Please join our community call to share your thoughts, plans, hopes, and dreams for the new year.  

Have you made resolutions for the new year?  

Are there things you want to accomplish?

What are your thoughts on working to make the world a better place this year?

I enjoyed reading Michael Moore's New Year's Resolutions.  They start with 1. Learn the names of the people two doors down from me and invite them over for dinner.  2.  Learn how to make dinner. And they end with 10. Keep walking, dude!  Here's the rest - 

I'd pretty much given up making resolutions, but I like the spirit of Michael Moore's and hope to have some to share with you on the 13th. And of course, this can be another year of living ethically.

And the website Why Evolution is True shared New Year's Illustrations as Illustrated by Cats made me smile; I expect you will too.

Please join us to share your thoughts and dreams with us on Sunday, January 13 and ask someone to join us.

From The Leader Read more »

Sunday, April 22, 2012 5pm PT, 6pm MT, 7pm CT, and 8pm ET. The number for the call is 866-740-1260, access code 5766842#. The call will last one hour.

Bart Worden, Leader of the Ethical Culture Society of Westchester, in White Plains, NY, will be joining the ESWoW Community Call to discuss the issue of racial bias in law enforcement, our part in such bias, and thoughts about what we can do to make positive changes.

Bart has been taking action on this issue in Westchester and wrote "Police Officers Reflect Our Racial Bias," for the local Westchester newspaper the Journal News. I found this paragraph to be most thought-provoking:

But let’s face it: our law enforcement is a reflection of us. Our own attitudes, opinions, misperceptions and apprehensions are what drive the behavior of law enforcement. Our obsession with personal safety, our fear of people who don’t look like us, our inattention to the lives of anyone who is not perceived as “our kind” lay the groundwork for racial bias and provide a sustaining environment for that bias.

Please invite anyone you know who is interested in this issue and/or Ethical Culture to participate in the call.

• Around the Ethical Movement - Anne Klaeysen,  Bart Worden
• Community Call - SUNDAY, April 22, 2012 - with Bart Worden
• American Ethical Union Assembly -  June 14- 17 

Around the Ethical Movement:  

Two colleagues have had articles published recently and I share them both with you.

Anne Klaeysen, Leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, and a recent presenter for an ESWoW Community Call, was published in the NY Times Room for Debate Forum.  Her article, "The Founders Preferred E Pluribus Unum,"  addresses the language found on all US currency.   Here's part of what Anne wrote:

The cost is only part of the problem with U.S. currency. As a religious humanist, I am more concerned with the words imprinted on every coin and bill in the United States: “In God We Trust,” a motto that the House of Representatives recently saw fit to reaffirm in a resolution that cited “a crisis of national identity.” A far more inclusive motto, “E pluribus unum,” proposed for the first Great Seal of the United States by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in 1776, also appears on all of our coins and some of our bills.

Please take a look at the full article and add a comment if you'd like. Read more »

Living for a year having no impact on the environment.  That's quite a challenge.  Yet that is what Colin Beaven and his family, wife Michelle Conlin and daughter Isabella did.  I'm not sure why, but I resisted watching the video I got out from the library.  I don't know if I expected someone who was holier than thou about living in an ecological manner, maybe I thought I'd feel guilty that I am not doing enough to protect the environment, to conserve energy.

It didn't help when someone told me that they were less impressed because the documentary was about a family with lots of financial resources, living on Fifth Ave. in Manhattan.  

But I knew I needed to watch it, so I finally popped the DVD in and thought I'd give it at least ten minutes.  I was hooked right from the start.  Here was a real family and they were making real choices and sacrifices, and at the same time, were going to make a lot more people aware of how their consumption affects the planet, and especially the future of our planet.

I found myself thinking yes, I can pay more attention to not buying things with lots of plastic packaging, I can be more careful to bring bags to the supermarket, I can take more political action around energy legislation.  And as someone who uses my bicycle as my main means of transportation I was pleased to see them getting around in NY on bicycles.

There were some things they did which I can't see myself doing - going without electricity for months, but it does make me think more about seeking alternative forms of power generation for my home.  I've been told that this location won't work well for wind generation, and my house isn't pointed in the right direction for solar panels, but that was a while ago and I know advances are being made all the time, so who knows.  Read more »