Address given by James Croft, Outreach Director for the St. Louis Ethical Society at the Ethical Culture Society of Westchester in White Plains, NY on Sunday, March 24, 2019.

For millennia, the idea that human beings have a supernatural “soul”—a spirit inside us which is more than simply matter—has played a central role in religious and spiritual traditions. But even if, like many Humanists, you do not believe that you have a literal “soul,” you might still use the word in a metaphorical sense, or talk about “soul music” or “soul food.”

What do these words mean, then, and what might an Ethical Humanist understanding of “soul” look like? How can we feed our Ethical Humanist “souls?”