As a preview of our upcoming 150th Anniversary, West Side Rag published a piece covering our founding in 1876–and legacy since–as an institution of social action and progressive institution-building:
In the beginning, there was a speech by a charismatic 24-year-old who had trained as a rabbi but chose a different path.
On May 15, 1876, Felix Adler spoke in front of invited guests at a rented hall at 42nd Street and Broadway in Manhattan, laying out his vision for a religious movement divorced from a deity that prioritized ethical action, putting deed above creed.
Nearly 150 years later, the Ethical Culture movement he conceived lives on, its original community still operating out of a landmarked Art Nouveau building at West 64th Street and Central Park West.
And despite never reaching the membership of other world religions (at its height in the years after World War II, the New York society had over 1,000 members), the movement has made an outsized difference for social justice, “punching well above its weight in the last century-and-a-half,” Richard Koral, the leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, said at its annual Founders Day meeting earlier this month.
Over the next year, the society will celebrate its upcoming sesquicentennial with public events that honor its origins and carry forward its cause.
“It’s extraordinary how many things the society was engaged with and how impactful it was through its history,” Koral, a retired lawyer with a doctorate of ministry, said in his Founders Day address.
[…]At the Founders Day meeting, Elizabeth Singer, president of the society’s board of trustees, spoke about plans for the year ahead.
“We’re kicking off our 150th anniversary a year ahead so that we can, for the next year, celebrate all different aspects of what makes this Ethical Culture,” she said. The events, she added, will offer “a full understanding of our past … the present, and where the future will be.”
