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Ethical Culture Journal October 2017
Reflections: A Journal on Ethical Culture Ideas and Community Life
Edited by Joe Chuman
Reflections is an online journal providing essays of opinion on the ideas animating Ethical Culture and the enrichment of its cultural life. Each issue will invite responses on a common theme. Writers are drawn from the National Leaders’ Council of Ethical Culture and contributors from the wider Ethical Movement.
We hope you enjoy reading Reflections and it will inspire discussion about the issues it raises. We invite your comment. For October 2017, the question is:
“Ethical Culture was founded on freedom of conscience, and we are proud to say that we espouse no dogma, doctrine or creed. Yet, clearly Ethical Culture endorses a set of principles, which emerge as “second order” beliefs from our guiding commitments to the primacy of ethical ideals and the dignity of the person.
In short, Ethical Culture cannot be based on whatever anyone chooses to believe and there are boundaries as to what beliefs fall within Ethical Culture and those which do not. But how are those boundaries established? Is it what the founder, Felix Adler, espoused? The collective beliefs of Ethical Culture’s professional leaders? The funded history of the Ethical Movement? Or, some other criterion?”
Click an image below to read that author’s response