In-Person Services, Columbia, SC Sundays 11AM

Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society: The Wisdom of Frans de Waal

Service Date:

Speaker:

(Click for more info about the speaker)

There is a popular belief about Nature that we live in a dog-eat-world of brutish survival of the fittest. If such a pessimistic world view ever makes you depressed, primate psychologist Frans de Waal offers an optimistic counterpoint. He found striking evidence that animals other than humans have empathy and a sense of fair play, as well as cognition. Dr. Michael
Sullivan will discuss de Waal’s counterintuitive findings from the uplifting The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. These include the ways that empathy has evolved in animals as a widespread adaptive trait, underscoring the intelligence of animals which is often dismissed.

Speakers

Past Services

On Being Spiritual

The development of spiritual virtues – loving all of life, even the hard parts; equanimity, compassion – may be entirely a matter of getting our neurons wired a certain way, but the circuitry of spirituality differs from the circuitry of cognition and emotion, though it draws on both.

From Tyranny to Transformation

Our country is experiencing what Timothy Synder terms tyranny and appears to be heading toward authoritarian control. Many (all?) of us are finding the experience scary and frightening. What does our UU value of transformation have to say to us as we strive to resist tyranny and enact a radical transformation of ourselves and our […]

Accessibility Toolbar