Transcendentalism Initiative Essay Series

Essays from scholars, independent researchers and writers across a range of disciplinary backgrounds

Transcendentalism Initiative
Michael Corhell's photo of ice and water at Walden

Transcendentalism Essay Series

Edited by Russell C. Powell

"Children of the Fire": A Provocation in Five Parts
By Rochelle L. Johnson | Edited by Russell C. Powell 1. One evening last Spring, a class of senior Environmental Studies majors and I sat outside on the quad of The College of Idaho, where I teach, discussing the early American phenomenon of passenger...
Wildfire in Idaho

Two Perspectives on Emerson's Journals
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...
Emerson portrait

Grappling with the T-word
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...
A dictionary with magnifying glass

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...
Poppy

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 grave

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...
Eastern State Penitentiary Aerial

The Transcendentalist Eye

For Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, to see was to behold the sacred in the commonplace. In this essay, Richard Higgins treats sight within Transcendentalist tradition as a discipline for bringing wonder and spiritual awakening into focus. 

The perfect leaf

Thomas Merton's Living Thoreauvian Legacy

Examining a fragile ink drawing tucked away in an archive, Alda Balthrop-Lewis considers Thomas Merton's reprisal of Henry David Thoreau’s image of sleepers and railroads from the book Walden to ask whether those who have been run over might yet learn to...

Merton's painted words, "a few are riding[,] the rest have been run over."

Mystical Scriptures Essay Series

Edited by Gosia Sklodowska

Encountering Mirabai through Translation
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...
Krishna and Radha

Lydia Maria Child and the Eclectic Church of the Future
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...
Lydia Maria Child