Transcendentalism Initiative Essay Series
Essays from scholars, independent researchers and writers across a range of disciplinary backgrounds
Transcendentalism Initiative
Cultivating Ecological Vision: Thoreau, Emerson, and Goethe
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...
Transcendentalism and the Politics of Failure
By Russell C. Powell A mystery is announced—heralded, really—toward the end of the first episode of Erik Ewers and Christopher Loren Ewers’ new three-part documentary film Henry David Thoreau , produced by Ken Burns and Don Henley, which was released...
Thoreau in Our Time: Film, Conversation, and a Living Legacy
By Jeffrey Blackwell More than 170 years after the publication of his groundbreaking book Walden and his essay “Civil Disobedience,” the eclectic writer, naturalist, activist, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau continues to resonate with new generations...
Fuller, Journalism, and Redemptive Prison Reform in New York
By Brigitte Bailey | Edited by Russell C. Powell In one of her first articles for the New-York Daily Tribune in 1844, Margaret Fuller reported on the founding meeting of the New York Prison Association, which organized reformers into what would become an...
Mystical Scriptures: The Transcendentalists’ “Cabinet of Mystic and Theosophic Lore”
In April 1843, the Transcendentalists’ periodical The Dial departed from its usual mix of essays, poems, and reviews to publish a rare catalogue of over two hundred titles, forming a “cabinet of mystic and theosophic lore.” The cabinet was a curated...
Nietzsche at the Feet of Emerson: Education, Transfusion, and Transcendentalism's Living Legacy
By Nicholas Low | Edited by Russell C. Powell When people discover that you study religion, they often ask about your religious background or what tradition you belong to. For years now, my answer to this question has been that I was raised “accidentally...
A Holy Liberty to Act—To Be: Mary Moody Emerson and Margaret Fuller on Self-Actualization
By Noelle A. Baker, Guest Contributor | Edited by Russell C. Powell It was summer 2023, and I was shopping at the farmers market in Highlands Square in Denver with my husband, Will Hare. 32 nd Avenue is one of our favorite streets. Tucked into a...
Rediscovering Thoreau: A Conversation with Filmmaker Erik Ewers
"The best part about Thoreau, and I really want to stress this to people, is that he's not telling you to go live in the woods in nature. He's not telling you to do his experiment. He's telling you to do your own experiment."
The Transcendentalist Eye
By Richard Higgins | Edited by Russell C. Powell I like to keep a brisk pace when I walk, but recently I’ve found myself stopping to look at unusually perfect leaves. It is more like being arrested than choosing to stop. If I walk by one, something...
Margaret Fuller’s Reproductive Method and the Making of Women’s Voices
By Ulrike Wagner, Guest Contributor | Edited by Russell C. Powell Building on author Megan Marshall’s focus on the women of Transcendentalism in this series, I ask what use the movement had for them and what use it might still have for us. Marshall...
A Missing Witness to Fuller: Mickiewicz, Emerson, and the Woman Reformer
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...
Thomas Merton's Living Thoreauvian Legacy
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...
![Merton's painted words, "a few are riding[,] the rest have been run over."](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_16_9__960x540/public/2026-01/Riding_0.jpeg?h=06a4eb04&itok=DxQrp6Ez)
The Largesse of Thoreau and Whitman
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...
Thoreau’s “Succession of Forest Trees” and the Challenge of Change
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...
Our Celestial Railroads
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...
Transcendentalism Then—And Now
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...
Practicing Transcendentalism
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...
Retrieving Transcendentalism amid the Crisis of Attention
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...
Thoreau and the Future of the Senses
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...
