For millennia, the idea that human beings have a supernatural “soul”—a spirit inside us which is more than simply matter—has played a central role in religious and spiritual traditions. But even if, like many Humanists, you do not believe that you have a literal “soul,” you might still use the word in a metaphorical sense, or talk about “soul music” or “soul food.” What do these words mean, then, and what might an Ethical Humanist understanding of “soul” look like? How can we feed our Ethical Humanist “souls”?

Our guest speaker is James Croft, the Outreach Director of the Ethical Society of St. Louis, one of the largest Humanist congregations in the world. There he helps people grapple with the biggest challenges of life, without reference to God or traditional religion. He studied education and human development at Cambridge and Harvard, where he read too much and slept too little. James was raised on William Shakespeare, Carl Sagan, and Star Trek, and lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his fabulous drag queen husband Kolten.