Ethical Culture Roots

In 2000, Jean Kotkin, a Leader at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, delivered the following Platform Address on the topic of women in Ethical Culture. Before her death, she gave permission -- more than permission, encouragement -- to post the essay online. We are now including it in this collection of documents on Ethical Culture roots, where it sheds light on a less-known part of Ethical Culture history.

Women in Ethical Culture - Jean Somerville Kotkin

Felix Adler on the meanings of groups in our lives. The excerpt also includes a terse definition of "spiritual" as he presented it late in life.

From 1926:

As this is the Jubilee year of the Society for Ethical Culture, a stately, grave, and noble address by its Founder will be read with double interest, as much for its author as for its subject. For more than fifty years Felix Adler has been a seeker after “the secret of the good life,” alike in philosophy and in practice; and the result is a fine ethical mysticism, worth more to his country than many battleships.

Born in Germany seventy-five years ago, educated at Columbia University, with studies at Berlin and Heidelberg, Dr. Adler became professor of Hebrew and Oriental Litera­ture at Cornell in 1874. Two years later he founded the Society for Ethical Culture in New York, and has since been its leader and teacher. His philosophy is set forth in a noble book, An Ethical Philosophy of Life, aglow with a passion for righteousness, rich in spiritual gleanings, surveying the whole field of human relations.

In 1923 Dr. Adler was Hibbert Lecturer at Oxford, and his lectures, The Reconstruction of the Moral Ideal, must be accounted one of the pioneer books of our time in its quest for a group-morality. It is a teacher austerely chaste and clear-seeing, both in thought and style, who speaks to us in the following address, the full title of which was “An Ethical Attitude toward the Departed.”

Death Penalty: Against the Execution of Children

Festival of the Winter Solstice

The Ethical Manifold

Ethical Culture vs. Imperialism

The White Man's Burden Is Sentimentalism

The Philippine War: Two Ethical Questions

Anti-Democratic Tendencies in American Life

Character vs. Destiny

The Ethics of Marriage

Some Characteristics of the Ethical Movement

The Basis of the Ethical Movement

Harvest of Gratitude

The Supreme Ethical Rule: Act So As To Elicit the Best In Others ...

On the Occasion of the Fifty-Fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the Ethical Movement

Founding Address by Felix Adler