At the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel last Friday night, the pioneering primatologist known for her decades of research with chimpanzees in Tanzania, kept a packed audience in rapture for just under two hours. After two introductions and a lengthy processional that included lines of children and a floating paper dove, Goodall stood, took in the massive crowd, and began her speech. Her remarks were modest yet impressive. She spoke freely of her family life—her mother in particular—and of her rise to the top of the male-dominated scientific world. She took responsibility for the failings of her generation in preserving the planet, although from the crowd’s enchantment it was clear that no one in attendance would have blamed her for any of the world’s problems. All the while, she appeared learned and earnest, even if the ceremony of the event dulled some of her charms.

As she talked about her childhood love of animals and her transition from scientist to activist, Goodall occasionally stumbled over her words. She would pause awkwardly or mispronounce a simple word or stammer through a phrase. But her mistakes didn’t seem to come from exhaustion or the effects of old age. Instead, it seemed that every story and topic contained a thousand more insights and ideas. When she spoke of Roots & Shoots, the community empowerment organization she helped found, she discussed everything from animal behavior and Tanzania to poverty and global warming. If she choked on her words, it was only because she had too much to share and not enough time.

Near the end of her speech, Goodall announced that she would throw a tiny stuffed animal into the crowd. Grown men grew giddy, college students stopped texting, children stood on pews. The stuffed gorilla, Goodall announced, would grant something good to whoever caught it. She tossed it high and hard, and as it flew over the audience, hundreds of hands reached up to grab it. Goodall smiled a little coyly and stepped away from the podium as the crowd sprang to their feet.

Employing, as the East Bay Express and Associated Press describe, her “brutal, but hilarious” and “raucous and irreverent” humor, Wong engaged the crowd in trying to answer the essential questions, “Why are we so depressed? And killing ourselves?” And by confronting the issue explicitly, Wong did something American society hasn’t been able do: identify these dropped stitches in society, unravel the statistics, and redo the stitch correctly. Though Wong rhetorically joked that she, “Christina Wong, would solve all of our problems” through the merits of her own creative work, she admitted that in some ways, the issue of mental health is so diffuse and diverse even with this distinct group that perhaps a solution may be difficult to find.

In fact, as she ended her performance, revealing that her own character had only been pretending to be sane throughout the play and shedding her clothes down to a hospital smock, Wong alluded to the possibility that perhaps what American society believes to be a perfect stitch has been a dropped one all along.

After the preludes, hymn, and convocation prayer (“Creative God, source of the evolution of life…”) two members of the choir read a selection from the play “Inherit the Wind,” based on the trials over teaching evolution in public schools. Representing the trial’s lawyers, William Jennings Bryan and “the gentleman from Chicago” Clarence Darrow, they stood on either side of the aisle to reenact the dialogue between evolution and the Bible.

Taking to the pulpit in red choral robes, Tuttle began by recalling his first visit to the cathedral: “I never thought I would sing with the choir much less preach to them…” There were moments when the anthropologist seemed out of his element, stumbling in the reading of the gospel and apologizing awkwardly. But his sermon, a critical biography of Darwin’s ideas, was thoughtful, effective, and well received. He told the story of the biologist’s statue in London’s natural history museum, which has moved from a central staircase to the cafeteria and back again depending on the popularity of his legacy. He also recalled the UofC’s past role in the dialogue with Julian Huxley’s 1959 sermon to Rockefeller, which marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of “The Origin of Species.” In his conclusion Tuttle quoted Kahlil Gibran on the value of faith: “[The believer] understands through his inner thought that which the outside examiner cannot understand with his demanding, acquired process of thought.”

The new dean of Rockefeller, Rev. Dr. Elizabeth Davenport, acknowledges the challenge of the service. “There are people out there who would scoff at the very notion of our celebrating Darwin in a religious context—both those who think of religion as a fossil, and also those who perhaps misunderstand the nature of science as a way of knowing…We see them as asking different kinds of questions and coming to different kinds of answers.” Amen.

While few people who don the adjective “notorious” are actually worthy of the term, Davis is among the select few who deserve it. A former member of the Black Panther Party, she was accused of murder in 1970 and placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Although she was acquitted two years later, her imprisonment in the interim inspired thousands of people around the world to take up the cause of her freedom, and her name and image became the ubiquitous focal points of a cult-of-Che-style revolutionary rallying cry. And yet you wouldn’t know it from the apparent discomfort with which Davis, now in her sixties (although still topped off by her well-known ‘fro), regarded the raised pulpit where speakers at Rockefeller normally deliver their remarks. Like many compelling orators, she came across as both humble and sage, and seemed to take a genuine pleasure from the gathering—not just for the ego boost one surely gets when hundreds of people gather to hear one’s opinion, but for the sheer love of being together—the feeling Davis described as “the spirit that exists when people come together in the city.”

Most of Davis’s lecture was focused around that idea of collectivity, both as something to be admired and reveled in, and as a necessary foundation of effective political action. She cautioned that we have to “rescue Dr. King from his official legacy” and remember that he was no Messiah; the Civil Rights Movement did not spontaneously burst forth from his aggregated willpower. “Segregation was disestablished,” Davis declared, “because ordinary people became aware of themselves as agents of social change…The most central actors in creating these movements will always be people whose names we will never know.” Later, she commented on the cultural habituation that leads us to view this collective victory in terms of one man’s success, calling it “a very dangerous individualism.”

Davis is by no means the first person to make this observation, but it turned out that the most remarkable part of the evening arrived when she tried to make her own words come to fruition. In the question-and-answer portion of the night, when the line was inevitably long and peppered with people who didn’t have questions so much as a desire to champion one cause or another, Davis was unafraid to deviate from the usual academic detachment. Instead of trying to shut people up when they approached the microphone with a grievance or an event announcement instead of a question about the lecture, she used each person’s time as an opportunity for spontaneous political action. “Okay, what’s your name? Fred? Okay, Fred, you stand over here by the lectern, and if anyone in the audience is interested helping Fred shut down the super-max prison downstate, go talk to him and exchange emails and come up with some ideas.” She answered every question, several of which were plaintive requests for personal direction (because this is America, and individualism won’t go down without a fight). And when it was all finally over, the chapel, if not packed anymore, was still heartily occupied with newly formed political action groups making excited plans. “We constitute a temporary community!” Davis cried out with an emphatic joy. “Let’s see if we can turn it into something permanent!”

Students delivered readings from three different religious texts, including a recitation sung in Arabic from the Koran that had audience members looking to their neighbor for assurance that they weren’t the only ones a little startled and confused. Soon after, a grey-haired man dressed in a white suit and suspenders walked resolutely up to the front and began singing a wandering, off-beat a capella piece using a variety of intonations. Identifying himself only as “travis” (uncapitalized), his performance was representative of his larger artistic work, which uses live performance in order to explore themes of race, gender, and colonization.

While these sections of the service seemed a little hard to place into the more obvious context of the gathering—Dr. King’s legacy—when Loretta Ross came to the pulpit to deliver her keynote address, the diverse components of the service became the point. Introduced as an activist working in the spirit of Dr. King, Ross clarified how her work in women’s reproductive rights, gay and lesbian rights, and more generally human rights fits into the picture of King’s work for civil rights. While she admitted to becoming a feminist for personal reasons after the experience of having a child in high school and becoming sterilized by age 23, her experience working at the Center for Democratic Renewal led her to discover that her status as a feminist should have in no way limited her from fighting in all areas of human rights. Looking back into Dr. King’s speeches, she found that he intended to lead a universal human rights movement and that he became the leader specifically of the civil rights movement due mostly to historical circumstances.

She challenged the audience to expand their idea of human rights, emphasizing that tolerance is never enough in a struggle that requires action to fundamentally alter the state of society. Her work as the founder of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, the co-director of the largest protest in U.S. history, and the founder of the National Center for Human Rights Education, among other accomplishments, convey just this spirit of action on multiple fronts that she has found to be the real goal of King’s life work. Forty years later, the work of Martin Luther King Jr. was not just something to remember and honor, but something to re-examine and inspire a movement in human rights that, in the minds of Ross and many others, has a long way to go.