Living Texts

Living Texts is a new CSWR video series that invites scholars, writers, and practitioners into conversation with formative texts from religious, spiritual, philosophical, and literary traditions.

Each episode centers on one or more texts chosen by the featured guest: canonical works, lesser-known writings, archival materials, or overlooked fragments that continue to live and resonate across time. 

During its inaugural year, Living Texts will be closely connected to the CSWR’s Transcendentalism Initiative, which is very fitting, given that the series takes inspiration from the Transcendentalists themselves. In 1842–43, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau helped launch the “Ethnical Scriptures” series in The Dial, the Transcendentalist periodical, presenting selections from a wide range of religious and philosophical traditions, including Confucian, Hindu, Persian, and Hermetic sources. Emerson framed the project as an effort to gather “the grand expressions of the moral sentiment,” “the rules for the guidance of life,” and “the bursts of piety … to the Invisible and Eternal” from the scriptures and wisdom traditions of many nations.

Living Texts revisits that very same concept while also reimagining it. Unlike the minimally framed selections that appeared in The Dial, this series asks contemporary scholars to guide viewers into the historical contexts, interpretive challenges, and living questions that these texts open.

The series will turn its lens—both metaphorically and literally—toward Transcendentalist texts themselves: writings by Emerson and Thoreau, but also by Margaret Fuller, the Peabody sisters, the Alcotts, and other figures whose work expands our understanding of the movement.

Hosted by CSWR Executive Director, Gosia Sklodowska, whose work explores how archival resources, overlooked texts, and digital scholarship can bring historical traditions into conversation with contemporary audiences through projects including Digital Fuller and Mystical Scriptures.