Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: Walter Lippmann wrote, "Modern man who has ceased to believe, without ceasing to be credulous, hangs, as it were, between heaven and earth, and is at rest nowhere." 1 The secular Lippmann located the source of this feeling of unmooredness in the particulars of modernity, where the religions of the past were no longer credible, but men (and also, although not in an identical way, women) still sought something to believe in.If the acids of modernity-in his famous phrase-had dissolved the worldviews that made religions plausible, they had not dissolved the human needs that religion had fulfilled.Despite their otherwise often disparate outlooks, Felix Adler, Reform rabbi turned founder of the Ethical Culture movement, would have agreed.Unlike Lippmann who spoke mainly to an elite that had already become cognizant of the homelessness of their belief, 2 Adler set out to convince his readers that traditional religions had neither met the spiritual needs nor offered the proper tools of moral cultivation in modern America.Likewise noting the shortcomings of both "heaven" and "earth," Adler wrote that both "the economist" and "the moralist" had "failed in the crisis.Humanity cried out loudly * I am indebted to Clark Gilpin, Loren
Source: The Journal of Religion
DOI: 10.1086/666832
Author: Sarah Imhoff
Institution: Indiana University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2289273259