Toronto Oasis, Secular Community

PLEASE NOTE THAT WE WILL BE BACK IN OUR USUAL LOCATION:

569 Spadina Ave. 2^nd 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.

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue)

Our speakers this week, Rex Burks and Owen Younger, are coming all the way from Dallas Texas! They are members of the Fellowship of Freethought (FOF) in Dallas and have presented at Houston Oasis and Kansas City. You can check out their website at: https://skepticaltexans.org/.

Rex Burks and Owen Younger were both raised as devout fundamentalist Christians until reason and evidence eventually took over. Since leaving religion, they have both become enthusiastic students of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the early Christian church. For more than a year, Bible in hand, they have been visiting a wide range of Christian denominations and joining Sunday school class discussions with believers. Come hear their fascinating and sometimes humorous stories about the astonishing variety of belief among Christians and learn how an understanding and appreciation of this diversity can help make us all more effective advocates for freethought. SPOILER: Episcopalians and Pentecostals are not the same! Owen and Rex will also share their insights on effective ways to relate to different types of Christians and highlight the most common objections to non-belief they’ve repeatedly heard.

Our featured musicians will be CITIZEN JANE, a Toronto-based folk-pop duo that evocatively weaves powerful vocal harmonies with innovative string textures to create an emotionally charged soundscape.

The duo consists of married couple Reenie Perkovic (vocals, guitar, mandolin) and Lea Kirstein (viola, fiddle, cello, vocals), who met while studying classical music on the west coast of Canada. The ladies have since made a home in Toronto’s vibrant music scene.

Reenie grew up in the Toronto area, after her family escaped the civil war in her birthplace, Sarajevo, Bosnia. Reenie was a semi-finalist in the 2016 UK Songwriting Contest, and has released 3 solo albums. She has opened for Juno-nominated Alysha Brilla, and Annabelle Chvostek (Wailin’ Jennys).

Lea is an acclaimed violist and fiddler, who grew up in Victoria, BC, where she studied viola and music education at UVic. Classical musician by day and fiddler by night, Lea discovered new ways of melding the two styles into one. Her passion for these genres took her across Canada & the U.S. with the Folk Arts Quartet. She has recorded with Juno-nominated artists Oliver Schroer and Teresa Doyle.

To RSVP to this event, please visit our Meetup page.

In order to make the world a fair and equitable place for all humankind, its inhabitants will need to work together. And if they are to work together they will need a shared language of expressing ideas that reflect both current realities and future hopes. In his presentation, our featured speaker this week, A. D’Agio, will focus on the language being used in the current discussions around racism in North America (circa 2018).  Although the focus will be on racism, A. D’Agio’s intent is to address and engage the broadest sense of “ism” as it impacts individuals and communities.

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

Our musical performer will be Elizabeth Block.  Elizabeth was born in New York and loves telling people, “I wuz boan in Brooklyn. You gotta PROBLEM wid dat?”  She was brought up on Gilbert & Sullivan, Broadway musicals (when they were written for singers), and the songs of Arthur Block – her dad wrote songs. She went to the High School of Music and Art, where she was an art student, but was allowed to sing in the senior chorus in her last year. She was a choral singer for decades, and a church soloist for many years. She joined Toronto’s informal folk song circle in – she thinks – 1984. She had always enjoyed folk music, but now she is a full-fledged folkie. A few years later she decided she should learn to play the guitar, which she did – not well, but well enough to accompany herself and other people. She knows a lot of songs, some in other languages, many satirical and/or political. She has written new words to existing tunes, and a couple of times tunes to existing words, never an entire song – but there’s still time.

Elizabeth is a potter by trade.  You can check out her pottery work on her website:

http://www.elizabethblockpottery.com/

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue)

This week (and next week) we will explore an issue that divides Canadians and Provinces.  The Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline System, or simply the Trans Mountain Pipeline, is a pipeline that carries crude and refined oil from Alberta to the west coast of British Columbia.  It is wholly owned by the Canadian division of Kinder Morgan Energy Partners (Kinder Morgan) and has been in use since 1953. It is the only pipeline to run between these two areas. The expansion of the pipeline is facing numerous challenges and is pitting Canadians and provinces against one another.  So, where do you weigh in on this matter and how do you understand the issues? 

Over the next two Sundays, June 10^th and June 17^th, we will have activists who are working to stop the Kinder Morgan Pipeline buyout by the federal government speak to this current issue at Oasis.

Our musical performers will be the Pickle Juice Trio: Arnd Jurgensen, Bob Vespaziani, and Cassie Norton – eclectic musicians whose playing and influences cross many stylistic boundaries. The Pickle Juice Trio is an exploration of rhythms, structures and melodies derived from the blues, gospel and swing music of the mid twentieth century by three musicians who crossed paths in the improvised music scene in Toronto.  

Arnd Jurgensen has been a prominent contributor to TO’s improvised music scene with his finger style guitar playing and baritone vocals. Percussionist Bob Vespaziani, also a staple on the improvised music scene, demonstrates his years of experience backing numerous blues and swing performers around town. Violinist Cassie Norton with influences from folk, jazz and classical music adds an unusual and intriguing colour to this not so conventional blues trio.

To RSVP to this event, visit our Meetup page.

PLEASE NOTE THAT WE ARE IN A DIFFERENT BUILDING FOR THIS WEEK’S MEETING- Sidney Smith Hall, 100 St George St., Room 2111.

Our featured speaker will be Jess Bootsma.  Experiences growing up on a dairy farm prompted Jess to question the validity of eating meat. After moving to Toronto, she heard about the Toronto Vegetarian Association (TVA) and promptly became a member. At the time, 32 years ago, she borrowed John Robin’s books, Diet for a New America and Diet for a New World from their lending library. These books solidified for her that she was on the right path by cutting out meat. Many of the things Robbins talked about she knew to be true but he also made her think about things she’d never thought about before such as how much more a cow eats than a human and why not reduce land use by feeding plants to humans instead of channeling them through animals.

Since joining TVA Jess has learned so many more benefits to cutting animal products from the menu. These are some of the things she will talk about during the presentation along with easy ways to swap out meat for plant-based products and which foods to eat for protein, iron and calcium.

As a retired graphic designer, Jess often does outreach work for TVA at events such as the Toronto Veg Fest, Veg Spring Market, Vegan Bake-off, Gay Pride Festival and many more. Other retirement pastimes include back-country canoe trips, cross country skiing, hiking, yoga and artwork. This will be her very first time presenting about TVA and ways to make the switch to a plant-based diet.

Our featured musician will be Adam Faux.  Adam Faux is a composer, singer and songwriter, producer, teacher and sound engineer based in Toronto.  He has a masters specializing in music composition from York University in Toronto, teaches at the Regent Park School of Music, and is leader of the band, the Luck Factory.

Adam’s debut album was recorded in 1987 as a member of the indie band Pigfarm. Pigfarm charted # 34 in the U.S. and top 10 continuously on college radio in the 80’s and 90’s. He recorded and mixed the Gemini award winning film the Film Club and the award-winning documentary the Jews of India.  Most recently, Adam produced, mixed, co-wrote and played on the 2014 debut release, Brooklyn Doran’s there’s a Light On, which was nominated for a Toronto music award for “Best Contemporary Album”. Many of the songs featured in the 2015 feature movie, the Cocksure Lads, were mixed and edited by Adam in 2010.

During the past 10 years, Adam has done live sound for over 3000 shows.

As a performer, Adam has shared the stage with performers such as the Barenaked Ladies, Randy Bachman, and Big Sugar, Mary Margaret O’Hara, Jim Carol and Blair Backham.

To RSVP to this event, visit our Meet up page.

Our event starts at 11 am on the 2nd floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue)

Advocating for human rights and gender equality, Soroptimist International is a global volunteer movement with a network of over 75,000 club members in 122 countries. Founded in 1921, it is the largest women’s service club in the world.  The membership of Soroptimist peaked in the last quarter of the twentieth Century.  As with most service clubs and similar organizations, Soroptimist has seen a decline in members, particularly in the Americas and Europe. Referring to Soroptimist, Barbro Stalbecker-Pountney, a lawyer and the current President of Soroptimist International of Toronto, will lead a discussion on the relevance of such clubs to the social fabric of society and growing civic disengagement amongst younger generations in particular. Is there a way to re-engage?

At the heart of Soroptimist International’s advocacy is its work across six United Nations (UN) Centres, where its UN representatives ensure that the voices of women and girls are heard. The membership of Soroptimist works on grassroots projects to improve the lives of women and girls locally and globally – helping women and girls achieve their individual and collective potential, realize aspirations and have an equal voice in communities worldwide.

Our featured speaker Barbro Stalbecker-Pountney, the current President of Soroptimist International of Toronto, is also a Past Director of Soroptimist International of the Americas Eastern Canada Region Board. Barbro is a lawyer who obtained her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of Western Ontario, and her Master of Laws degree from Osgoode Law School, York University. After beginning her career in general practice in a small community in Bruce/Gray counties, she returned to Toronto, spent several years in legal publishing before returning to law practice. She takes a preventative approach to legal issues and focusses her law practice on wills, and estates in addition to charity and not-for-profit law. A regular presenter to community groups in her areas of concentration, Barbro also teaches law at Humber College. She is an active participant in her community and has served in many capacities including positions such as: Past Chair Mental Health Programme Services of Metropolitan Toronto; Past Co-Chair, Older Women’s Network; Past Board member, Children’s Aid Society of Grey County; Past President, Scandinavian Canadian Business Association; Past Chair General Practice Section (Ontario Bar Association); Past Board member, Swedish Women’s Educational Association (Toronto). She held the position of Editor, Canadian Encyclopedic Digest (Ont.) for a number of years and is Co Author of “Cohabitation: the law in Canada”.

Our featured musician will be Emilyn Stam.  Emilyn Stam is a Toronto-based fiddler, pianist and accordionist who creates, performs, records and teaches in folk, trad, and neo-trad styles from Europe and Canada.  She has 4 Canadian Folk Music Award Nominations, (The Shoeless, Eh?!, Lemon Bucket Orkestra) and 2 Juno Award Nominations (Lemon Bucket Orkestra). For more on our musical performer, please check out her website emilynstam.com.  Emilyn with be performing with her partner John Williams.

To RSVP to this event, visit our Meetup page.

Our Event starts at 11am on the second floor of the Koffler House (569 Spadina Avenue)

Hoping that the third time is the charm, our featured speaker will be Michelle Bilek! Previous two attempts in having Michelle speak to our group had been thwarted by illness (March 18th) and bad weather (April 15th ice storm).

Michelle Bilek*, is with the Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness (caeh.ca), formed to build a national movement to end homelessness from the community up. What’s missing is a practical, community-based approach that shifts the focus from managing homelessness to a system focused on ending it. We need to move from crisis responses (like shelters and soup kitchens) to solutions – permanent, appropriate, safe and affordable housing with the support necessary to sustain it. Michelle will share how Canadian communities can end homelessness by outlining the critical ingredients of a community-based plan such as Housing First, supporting affordable housing options, housing sharing, renting secondary units for Housing First clients, innovative building solutions and developments.

Our featured musician will be Erika Werry. Erika Werry is a band leader, singer, songwriter and has a background in classical and modern dance. Her song material is inspired by travels and day-to-day experience, and through a love of classic French and English literature. The songs are short and fun, often with tongue-in-cheek lyrical humour and sometimes with devastatingly poignant lyrics on relationships. A consummate performer, Erika sings and dances through her fast-paced sets. Her songs are delivered with her signature vocals, in a “… lovely… grainy alto”.

To RSVP to this event, please visit our Meetup page.