Social and ethical questions become ever more urgent while the creedal religions speak in increasingly diverse voices. The Ethical Culture movement, founded in 1876, was early in recognizing that this would occur, and its creation made available a membership society organized for people who felt it important to adopt a moral and spiritual identification that necessitated commitment to ethical knowledge and practice. This book speaks for itself. It describes the Ethical Movement as viewed by a member of its Board of Leaders who also served as Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. The fact that the author was a son-in-law of Dr. Felix Adler gave him a privileged position from which to prepare this personal, yet scholarly, study. While this book is not an official publication of the Ethical Culture movement, it throws light upon its origin and development and should be of special interest to those who may find in Ethical Culture an answer to their moral and spiritual quest. -Sidney H. Scheuer

This book is made up of lectures given, for the most part, before the Society for Ethical Culture of Chicago. The premise tying all of these lectures together is that while not all religions teach morality, they are all based on ethical principles; that it is one's duty to obey the laws of ethics whether or not one professes a religion; and that men who would not obey them could do no good either to themselves or to others, in this world or the next. Moral action, ethics, Darwinism, the social ideal, personal morality, the ethics of Jesus, the failure of Protestantism and Unitarianism, and the basis of the ethical movement are among the topics discussed.

John Dewey was America’s greatest public philosopher. His work stands out for its remarkable breadth, and his deep commitment to democracy led him to courageous progressive stances on issues such as war, civil liberties, and racial, class, and gender inequalities. This book collects the clearest and most powerful of his public writings and shows how they continue to speak to the challenges we face today. An introductory essay and short introductions to each of the texts discuss the current relevance and significance of Dewey’s work and legacy. The book includes forty-six essays on topics such as democracy in the United States, political power, education, economic justice, science and society, and philosophy and culture. These essays inspire optimism for the possibility of a more humane public and political culture, in which citizens share in the pursuit of lifelong education through participation in democratic life. The essays in America’s Public Philosopher reveal John Dewey as a powerful example for anyone seeking to address a wider audience and a much-needed voice for all readers in search of intellectual and moral leadership.

Challenging the moral credentials of both capitalism and socialism, he proposed a "vocational democracy" in which the talents of each human being were to be expressed in vocation, in politics, and in schooling. As a reformer, he moved freely from the world of experience to the world of ideas. As a religious radical he drew upon this dialectical move to reconstruct what he called the "spiritual" universe. Opposed to otherworldliness, it was for him an evolutionary outcome of the process of "ethicizing" experience, that is of reconstructing work, school, and politics in the light of the moral ideal. Unlike the utopians, however, he insisted that frustration and the "pains of experience" were inevitable.

This book explores the culture, politics, and ideas of the nineteenth-century German secularist movements of Free Religion, Freethought, Ethical Culture, and Monism. In it, Todd H. Weir argues that although secularists challenged church establishment and conservative orthodoxy, they were subjected to the forces of religious competition.