Ethical Addresses - First Series - 1895

 

Ethical Addresses was a serial publication presented by the American Ethical Union.  The AEU was formed in 1889, 13 years after Felix Adler's Founding Address, which established the New York Society for Ethical Culture.  In those intervening years, three additional Societies were founded in Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago.  The Leaders for each of these three newer Societies apprenticed under the supervision of Adler in New York and then set out to found their own Societies in those cities.  In 1889, they formed the Union, and in 1895 they began assembling an annual series of volumes which collected selected platforms (speeches) given by the Leaders.  

The First Series, published in 1895, included three essays each by Felix Adler (New York) and William M. Salter (Philadelphia) and two essays each by Walter L Sheldon (St. Louis) and M. M. Mangasarian (Chicago).  The topics tend to cluster around general questions of religion and philosophy and where Ethical Culture fits in.  I have yet to read all of these essays, but I expect there will be some interesting variations among the different Leaders' viewpoints and our thinking in the present day.  I personally find it interesting to consider where we began, with the emphasis on idealism, and how we've changed, with more emphasis on pragmatism.  Naturalism in one form or another does seem to have endured.  

Two essays struck me as different from the others, so I've read them first.  One, by Adler, was "Prayer and Worship."  I rather expected that Adler would have condemned both prayer and worship as futile, there being no evidence of a deity and Adler himself urging us to put creed aside for the sake of common action.  His Founding Address, moreover, had emphasized that our Ethical Culture meetings would be "simple and devoid of all ceremonial and formalism."  In the same address, he added:

We propose to entirely exclude prayer and every form of ritual. Thus shall we avoid even the appearance of interfering with those to whom prayer and ritual, as a mode of expressing religious sentiment, are dear. [Emphasis added.]

I have seen nothing in any Ethical Culture Society meeting that I have attended (so far) that sounds like prayer or smacks of worship.  Adler surprised me in this platform.  He did find some space for both prayer and worship--as functions--within Ethical Culture, and what he came up with might even have qualified as religious experience to John Dewey.  In any case, I found it a lovely way to accept those concepts into Ethical Culture.

The second essay, by Mangasarian, is an interesting and sometimes practical discussion of "Teaching and Teachers."  Coming from a family of teachers and having some experience in the area myself, I was curious to see what Magasarian had to say.  As expected, there were some attitudes that fit in well with the period, including comments about women teachers and their need to be, well, more ladylike.  He did, however, make some very astute comments about both the value of education and the degree to which informal behaviors become lasting influences.  I'll probably read it again for the sake of its relevance to current discussions about education, the role of parents, and the influence of religion and politics on a, presumably, areligious and apolitical institution.

With this First Series came an immediate set of questions related to bibliographic style and the logistics of the project.

• Ethical Addresses is a serial.  It is an annual collection of speeches by different authors.  There is no named editor.  I am using the Chicago style for bibliographic entries, citing both the individual volumes of the series and each essay title as separate entries. 

         Author Last Name, First M. "Chapter or Essay Title." In Book Title, edited by First M. Last Name, page range.     Place of Publication: Publisher, date.

• Ethical Addresses is long out of copyright.  The entire series has been "digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from Microsoft Corporation."  All of the volumes are available in the Internet Archive (archive.org), some from multiple scan sources.  The First Series can be seen here.  The entire volume can be downloaded in PDF and other formats to read offline.
• It is possible with current technology to extract individual articles from the original volume.  I have, for my personal use, extracted both the Adler and Mangasarian articles discussed above so that I can look at them more closely to refer to them in my writing.  I would be interested to discuss the ethics of reposting those or other articles on a different website might be.  
• The First Series (and others in the series) has been reprinted from the Internet Archive scans by Leopold Classic Library and can be ordered on Amazon and other sources.

Next week I hope to have found a home for the bibliography so that others can use it as a resource.  Each iteration will be dated to reflect its current status (later dates will reflect more entries having been added).  I have begun adding the entries for Series Two; One and Three are completed; the background research on authors and subjects may take a bit more time to complete.