Transcendentalism Initiative

By Chloe Martinez I was a college sophomore in an introductory Hinduism class when I first encountered Mirabai, a sixteenth-century Hindu mystic. Her poems felt alive and immediate to me. I remember staring at the page, wondering, “How am I just now...

By Lawrence Rosenwald | Edited by Russell C. Powell The first time I read Emerson’s journals, I was reading as a scholar preparing a celebratory analysis, a case for their importance and majesty. My attitude was discipular or apostolary or evangelical...

By Robert Thorson | Edited by Russell C. Powell The scholarly literature on transcendentalism is full of good descriptions, but not of good definitions. In The Transcendentalists and Their World, Robert Gross consciously left the movement undefined...

In the third episode of "Living Texts," Phyllis Cole explores how Margaret Fuller took the Transcendentalist ideal of self-reliance and transformed it into a much broader argument for women’s freedom in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Fuller begins from...

By Leigh E. Schmidt | Edited by Gosia E. Sklodowska As a nineteenth-century social reformer and writer, New Englander Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) covered a lot of ground: woman’s equality, abolition, prison reform, historical fiction, children’s...

In the second episode of "Living Texts," John Kaag explores Ralph Waldo Emerson's lifelong engagement with theodicy—the enduring philosophical and religious question of how suffering and evil can exist within a universe imbued with the divine. Beginning...

By Ryan Shea | Edited by Russell C. Powell An encompassing ecological vision may be one of our best hopes not only for a healthy and habitable future, but also for a wise and worthwhile present. Such an ecology cannot be less than a science, but it can...

The Center for the Study of World Religions’ Transcendentalism Initiative will host a special screening of Episode 2 of Henry David Thoreau, a new documentary directed by Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers and produced by Ken Burns. The film is...

As part of our Transcendentalism initiative, we are pleased to host a book talk with Lawrence Buell in celebration of the publication of Henry David Thoreau: Living Disobediently (Oxford University Press, 2024). While no single event could fully encompass...