Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue)
Join us for something a little different this long-weekend Sunday – join us for a potluck lunch! Same place, same time. Come share your food, stories, experiences and insights!
When you RSVP on Meetup, please indicate, in the comments section, what you intend to bring: main dish, salad, dessert, or drinks. Thank you!
Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue)
Ritual can be found in all living species and since time immemorial, rituals of one kind or another can be identified in human civilizations. Rituals play an important role in society. Rituals remind us of what is important and provide a sense of stability and continuity in our lives. However, our modern society doesn’t always include formalized or consistent rituals to mark events or the passage of time.
This week’s discussion will explore the idea of ritual in our lives. What is ritual? Why is it important? How do you think about or experience ritual in your life? What kind of ritual(s) do we have in our Oasis community? How as an Oasis community do we think about ritual?
You are invited to think about ritual this week. What rituals are important to you and why?
Martin Frith will be our discussion leader. Martin is a founding member of Toronto Oasis and in his personal and professional life wears many hats. As a Humanist Officiant, he has led public rituals marking, births, deaths, marriages and separations. As a therapist, he has worked with individuals, couples, families and organizations to use ritual to manage transitions.
To RSVP to this event please visit our Meetup page.
Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue)
Based on and inspired by Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind – Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, this Sunday Tania Akon will lead us in a group discussion on morality. We will discuss key questions and findings addressed in the book such as:
“Where Does Morality Come From?”
“The Conservative Advantage”
“Why Are We So Groupish?”
Tania Akon is a Toronto Oasis organizer. She earned a B.A.Sc degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto and a B.Ed from OISE, also at UofT. She is currently a high school teacher and teaches Science-Physics/Mathematics/Computer Science.
To RSVP to this event please visit our Meetup page.
Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue)
This Sunday at Oasis, Dan Cooperstock will lead us in a review and discussion of the 5 Oasis principles, including their full-paragraph explanations, the 12 principles of Humanism (given that we are now an affiliate member of Humanist Canada), and for some more contrast, the 7 Unitarian Universalist principles, and the (over-simplified) 6 Quaker testimonies (principles for living).
Dan is the Toronto Oasis Treasurer, a non-theist Quaker, and a software entrepreneur, writing and selling software for charities and churches.
For anyone who would like to read all of those principles before the meeting, here is a link to the presentation, which contains them:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B-icUXlxfcN9H7Vnlo_xSL4EK4rmX5sx/view?usp=sharing
To RSVP to this event please visit our Meetup page.
From the earliest images of Lady Justice (ancient Egypt), to the silver screen’s adaptation of DC comic’s Justice League; we are a people that are both consumed and united by this one idea. It has been said that justice requires struggling, suffering, and sacrifice. Do we want more justice? Do we want a different kind of justice? Join us in a discussion as A. D’Agio facilitates a discussion on the topic of justice. What might justice look like in the 21st century, and what might be the cost?
Born in England, A. D’Agio resides now in Toronto, writing poetry and lyrics about humans, and their quirksome relationships with each another. Experience first hand the mind numbing madness:
https://twitter.com/HumanistPoet or https://www.facebook.com/HumanistPoetAdagio
To RSVP to this event please visit our Meetup page.
Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue)
In animals, predators are most often selfish loners, although wolves, many apes and most marine mammals hunt cooperatively. Herbivores normally either live individually in safe environments, like trees, or are highly gregarious. Humans are somewhere in the middle and this duality emerges in many forms such as the political split seen in many countries between competitive, business-oriented, low-tax policies versus community-minded, cooperative, pro-welfare-state policies, or even simply Good and Evil which are strongly associated with, respectively, giving to the community and taking from it.
Join us this week for a group discussion on this topic. Share your experiences, knowledge and ideas! The discussion will be facilitated by Bob Fisher. Bob is a physicist and engineer originally from the UK, based in Houston and working temporarily in Toronto. He is approaching retirement and has no formal training in sociology or psychology: in fact he doesn’t understand people at all. In his spare time he is working on a book for an improved system of democracy.
To RSVP to this event please visit our Meetup page.
PLEASE NOTE THAT WE WILL BE BACK IN OUR USUAL LOCATION:
569 Spadina Ave. 2nd Floor Main Activity Hall
Our events are held every Sunday at 11 am
For this Sunday’s Oasis meeting come participate in a workshop on rethinking how we conduct difficult conversations in our lives. The workshop will be led by Jonathan Miller. Formerly a project and marketing manager, Jonathan comes from the corporate world where he experienced firsthand the consequences of communication breakdowns. Workplace politics, conflict management and putting out fires wasted too much of his time and the company’s money. In 2016, he set out to study, develop and practice his own methodology for having clear and effective conversations. He now trains and coaches individuals on how to use their language to speak powerfully and authentically, be more productive and make meaningful connections.
In this workshop, we’ll touch on some high-level concepts in order to start rethinking the conversations we have in our lives. We’ll discuss concepts such as identity, defensiveness, and how to deal with that little voice inside your head.
To RSVP to this event please visit our Meetup page.
PLEASE NOTE THAT WE ARE NOT IN OUR USUAL LOCATION FOR THIS WEEK’S MEETING- WE WILL BE IN Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St George St., Room 2111.
Our events are held every Sunday at 11 am
How do our stories affect our engagement with societal issues, and how can we use stories for positive impact? We will begin with a story to set the stage for an open discussion about narrative. The invitation for group participants is 1) to explore how our own narratives influence our responses to world issues, and 2) to consider how narratives can both mitigate distress over the state of the world and inspire action.
The meeting will be led by Lindsay Kochen, who works at a mindfulness-based psychotherapy practice. In addition to her training in trauma-focused healing modalities, Lindsay has a background in outdoor education, community health research, supportive housing advocacy, and street outreach. She enjoys learning alternative healing practices and honouring the body-mind-spirit connection through music and art.
To RSVP to this event please visit our Meetup page.
Our events are held every Sunday at 11am
PLEASE NOTE THAT WE ARE IN A DIFFERENT BUILDING FOR THIS WEEK’S MEETING:Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St George St., Room 2111.
This week our featured speaker will be Nicole McLachlan. Growing up in Canada, Nicole always knew she’d love Africa, and sure enough after volunteering for several months in South Africa and Namibia, she fell in love with it beyond even her imagination. Nicole is especially taken with Africa’s wildlife, and their plight against poaching, habitat encroachment, and unknowingly harmful Western tourist dollars. She has taken her passion for Africa’s wildlife home with her through the retelling of stories and sharing of photography, in an effort to raise funds for organizations that touched her heart. She hopes to become more involved in more fundraising, in an official capacity, in order to entrench herself more closely with conservation, hoping to one day reside in Africa. Nicole will recount how she first ventured to Africa, and what’s lured her back many times since. Hear some personal stories of Nicole’s; beaten up by baboons, stranded in a national park with a flat tire, but also the reasons why she’s become so involved in educating about the plight of Africa’s most vulnerable animals.
For our musical act, we are so enthused to have three of our favourite and most familiar musicians: Erik Bleich accompanied by Cassie Norton and Tristan Murphy. Erik is a singer/songwriter whose genre blends classic pop and folk traditions – from street lit lullabies to manic, rambling romps. It’s his vision of folk music for the Internet Age. Cassie Norton is our music director and a Toronto based singer-songwriter, classically trained violinist/folk leaning tunesmith with a punk rock heart. Tristan Murphy aka Amateur is characterized as “old instruments, new music” and plays experimental pop songs on a variety of acoustic instruments.
To RSVP to this event please visit our Meetup page.
Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue)
In the year 2018, we can now boast an incredible level of self-awareness and understanding for why we do the things we do. Among our more incredible academic achievements, we now understand a great deal about how and why we human animals believe in spiritual ideas. We have come to learn about the social psychology of religious behaviors, the personal psychology of individuals engaging in these practices and how both are played out in the brain on a biological level. With this data in hand, we are in a much better position, right now, to investigate how social changes throughout history have affected the way we think – predictably altering how responsive we have been to different spiritual ideas over time. Research shows that as social groups have become relatively safer, more technologically advanced, more interconnected, more prosperous and better able to survive comfortably, the selection advantage for traditional, literally-interpreted supernatural faith seems to become less powerful on a long enough timeline. Not surprisingly, here in the present day, most of these factors are the best they’ve ever been for a greater proportion of the world’s population. Join Marc Schaus in exploring the effect these changes will have on religious practice for major faiths on an international level, with a tradition more resembling today’s secular humanism arguably being the strongest candidate for a “spiritual” path to survive into the long-term future.
Marc Schaus is a Canadian author and academic researcher. His 2017 book, Post Secular: Science, Humanism and the Future of Faith outlines the growth of secularism and nonreligion currently ongoing around the world with projections for both leading into the future. Marc’s work has previously been featured in Free Inquiry magazine, Patheos and The Huffington Post. His upcoming book This World First: Dispatches on Secular Progress Around the World will feature twenty of the planet’s leading authorities on secularism and outline a clear path forward for secular issues on an international level.
For our featured musician, we are so enthused to have Abigail Lapell on the Oasis stage this Sunday! Check out a sampling of her music at https://www.abigaillapell.com/. It’s awesome! Abigail Lapell is a Toronto folk noir songwriter who draws from roots, indie and punk rock traditions. Hailed as an artist to watch by NOW Magazine, she’s toured across North America and Europe, performing on vocals, piano, harmonica and finger style guitar. Closer to home, she’s completed tours by bicycle, canoe and train. Lapell won the 2017 Canadian Folk Music Award for Contemporary Album of the Year and the 2016 Colleen Peterson Songwriting Award from the Ontario Arts Council. Her new album, Hide Nor Hair, is out now on Coax Records.
To RSVP to this event please visit our Meetup page.
