This dissertation explores the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of John Dewey's theory of religious experience. While various interpreters have identified these two dimensions as key components in Dewey's philosophy of religion, no study has systematically studied their interrelationship. I thus take as my point of departure Dewey's statement that the religious is morality touched by emotion, with a keen interest in what Dewey means by the quality, nature, and scope of this touch. In addition to showing how these two dimensions are philosophically linked, this study also examines how they converge in practice. Using Dewey as my lens, I interpret the Good Friday Passion play at the San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio, Texas, and show that the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of this public ritual converge in their pedagogic function. The Passion play teaches participants about education in its deepest and broadest sense: it enacts the renewal of the social continuity of life. In reading the San Fernando Passion play in this way, I help Dewey move past his own shortsighted critique of religious institutions and demonstrate that institutional religion may, in particular cases, promote Dewey's deeper sense of the religious. This study demonstrates how Dewey's integral and functional model of religious experience mediates, if not bypasses, Romantic and neo-Kantian paths, and it speaks to current liberationist discourse that takes seriously the role of cultural aesthetics -- such as popular religion -- as a form of socially transformative praxis.