What Is an Ethical Society?
(Jone Johnson Lewis: 1995, 2002)
An Ethical Society
is a community of individuals
dedicated to making our lives and our world
more humane, more ethical;
Dedicated to the ideal
that every human being has worth and dignity,
and committed to a reverence for this world and all life.
Founding Address by Felix Adler
May 15, 1876
New York Society for Ethical Culture
In 1876, the 25-year-old Felix Adler delivered this address in New York City to an audience gathered by a group of men who had organized around Adler’s ideas for founding a new religious and philosophical movement.
FOR a long time the conviction has been dimly felt in the community that, without prejudice to existing institutions, the legal day of weekly rest might be employed to advantage for purposes affecting the general good. During the past few years this conviction has steadily gained in force and urgency, until lately a number of gentlemen have been impelled to give it shape and practical effect.
On the Occasion of the Fifty-Fifth Anniversary of the Founding of the Ethical Movement
An Address by Dr. Felix Adler
May 10, 1931
In this address, delivered when Dr. Adler was 80 years old and at the end of his career as the founding Leader of Ethical Culture, Adler looks back at the founding of the movement and the 55 years after. At the end, he reflects on possibilities for the movement's future.
IN this solemn moment, at the end of fifty-five years, my mind goes back to a certain May evening in 1876, when I saw before me an assembly of men and women who had summoned me to state explicitly the nature of the proposed Ethical Movement outlined by me in a previous public address. That evening the Society was founded. Of those who were present, the charter members of the society, I am, to the best of my knowledge, to-day the sole survivor. I am as it were the memory of the society. With deep gratitude I think of those who first asked me to lead them along a new path, and who followed so devotedly. They have all passed away, and others, thousands by this time, who succeeded them have passed -- a great procession! I greet them in meditative hours. Their faces are not mournful. Their extended arms point forward. They were interested in the future -- in something great to be. And they put their trust, not in a person but in an idea. From the first they resented the imputation that this could be a merely personal movement, they believed rather that it was destined to acquire a universal significance.
