“Beyond Supernaturalism: Mordecai Kaplan and the Turn to Religious Naturalism”

In this article, the author seeks to analyze the trajectory of Kaplan’s work that critically engaged traditional ideas of God and Jewish chosenness and that offered reconstructed notions of the divine and of Jewish self-understanding. Kaplan is located in a broader conversation that characterized Christian theologians and humanistic figures such as John Dewey during the first half of the twentieth century. Kaplan was thus responsive to the distinctive issues within his Jewish community while reacting and contributing to the wider conversations shaping American intellectual life in the twentieth century. It was therefore both as a Jewish intellectual and as a modern American intellectual–and in the interplay of the two–that his significance can be found. In order to explicate Kaplan’s critical and constructive contributions to the American and Jewish debates of his time, this article suggests that Kaplan and a number of other philosophical and theological thinkers set forth historicist, pragmatist, and naturalistic responses to the social and religious challenges of their day.