What Would Mordecai Kaplan Do? Study William James!
Ethan Merlin
Description
In 1915, Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, gathered a group of rabbinical students in his home on Saturday nights to study the writings of American psychologist and philosopher William James. Almost 100 years later, we’ll carry on this tradition by reading James in a Jewish context at the Summer Institute. James redefined religious belief in an age of science by focusing on the practical consequences of what we choose to believe. How did Kaplan and his early twentieth-century “havurah” apply James’s ideas in their reconstruction of Judaism? And what do we have to learn today from James’s “Torah”?
Ethan Merlin is a co-founder of Tikkun Leil Shabbat in Washington, DC. He studied Comparative Religion in college and wrote his senior thesis about the thought of William James and Mordecai Kaplan. He teaches middle and high school math (and minyan!) at the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, MD.
Notes
Categories
- Spiritual and Religious Life
- History and Culture
- Morning Course