It has become increasingly clear that a religious approach to life must address more than the intellectual needs of the person. This was understood in Adler's insistence that music accompany the Sunday lecture. But a holistic awareness of human needs must include other forms of intellectual learning, other forms of cultural inspiration, many forms of fellowship to meet different needs, and more channels of engagement with the world. We have developed naming, and marriage, and memorial ceremonies. We have developed festivals. We need to be continuingly creative in the development of such celebrations, while being very aware of the way in which ritual and ceremony (as did creed) came to be a substitute for moral experience in the religious history of the past. How our Ethical Societies may more richly offer uplifting experience to our members and explore a human spirituality should be on our agenda for the future. As we explore that agenda practically, we need intellectually to define and delineate the content and the parameters of an ethical spirituality, and to elaborate our understanding of the community in which all of this takes place.
©1997-2007 Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture
this page last revision: 4/23/07