Transcendentalism Initiative

After Margaret Fuller’s tragic death in 1850, Ralph Waldo Emerson, together with William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke, co-edited the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852). In a letter to the literary critic and historian Thomas Carlyle...

By Alda Balthrop-Lewis, Guest Contributor | Edited by Russell C. Powell The ink drawing pictured here (right) is held in the Merton Archive in Louisville, Kentucky, among a large number of abstract ink works that Thomas Merton made in the 1960s. He called...

By Jane Bennett, Guest Contributor | Edited by Russell C. Powell On November 10, 1856, Thoreau and his friend Bronson Alcott visited Walt Whitman and his mother at the Whitman house in Brooklyn, New York. Thoreau gives an account of the social call in two...

By Dan McKanan. Edited by Russell C. Powell Henry David Thoreau is many things to many people: an apostle of simplicity, a brilliant nature writer, a theorist of civil disobedience, one of the first Americans to turn to Asia for spiritual insight, and a...

By John Kaag, Guest Contributor. Edited by Russell C. Powell November in Concord, Massachusetts, is a special kind of madness. I live three miles from the Old Manse, and on a crisp Saturday morning, the tour buses start rolling down Monument Street before...

By Lawrence Buell , Guest Contributor. Edited by Russell Powell I discovered Transcendentalism as a discontented adolescent, when struggling to countervail an overdose of internalized dutifulness that included redundant Bible-based Sunday school classes...

By Megan Marshall , Guest Contributor. Edited by Russell Powell On a recent Friday in late September, unseasonably warm as so many New England days are now, I drove up to Salem for the premiere of my friend Scott Wheeler’s trio for violin, cello, and harp...

By Charles M. Stang I have come to believe that Thoreau should be understood as part of a long lineage of seers and visionaries, going back, in the West, to Thales, who is often remembered as the first philosopher among the Greeks, and who declared that...

By Russell C. Powell, CSWR Research Associate | Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey Why Transcendentalism? And why now? The inauguration of our new research initiative on Transcendentalism at the Center for the Study of World Religions is an opportunity to...