America's Founding Seeker

I agree. This is also the case with Thoreau--next year will be the 150th anniversary of the publication of "Walden." In both cases, you had a kind of prophetic voice trying to call a materialistic culture to a life of higher principle. It engaged men and women in their basic views of life, their views of nature and the environment. It affected views about women's rights and place in society. All these things have continued to be part of a changing American social scene.

In his journals he simply writes, "I am of the oldest religion." He is after this concept of absolute religion--a term Theodore Parker, another of the Trascendentalists, used to distinguish this permanent essence of spirituality from the various historical and institutional forms it takes in the history of culture.

He was a Unitarian [minister]. The Congregational and the Unitarian churches had begun the process of division in the 1820s that went on until the mid-19th century. His father's generation was part of a liberal movement led by William Ellery Channing, who is generally thought of as the founder of Unitarianism. Channing was one of Emerson's most important mentors.

So Emerson with some hesitation enters the ministry [in 1829], and he resigns his pulpit at the Second Church in Boston in 1832, in a dramatic break that signals partly a theological difference, but mainly a vocational crisis he is trying to resolve for himself. What is his proper role? How does he best find the audience for the message that he has? Is the church a viable vehicle for the kind of thinking, writing and lecturing that he wants to do?

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