Transcendentalism Reading Group

The 2025–26 Transcendentalism Reading Group has now concluded. Information about the 2026–27 reading group and related programming will be announced in the coming months.

This past year’s reading group explored the origins, development, and continuing legacy of American Transcendentalism. Emerging in the mid-19th century from New England Unitarianism and European Romanticism, Transcendentalism challenged inherited religious authority, literary convention, and political complacency, while advancing new visions of spiritual freedom, social transformation, and intellectual experimentation.

Participants engaged major works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, alongside writings by Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker, Orestes Brownson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Caroline Dall, and others whose contributions shaped the movement’s religious, philosophical, literary, and political dimensions.

Led by Russell C. Powell, Research Associate at the Center for the Study of World Religions, the group considered Transcendentalism not only as a historical movement, but also as a living tradition whose questions continue to resonate in contemporary discussions of ecology, spirituality, democracy, and cultural renewal.