Adult Relgious Education Program Recordings
The Prophets and Progressive Religion
How The Transcendentalist Circle Began?
Recorded on Sunday, September 30, 2018
Transcendentalists Revisited - Class led by Rev. Dr. John Buehrens
“Hedge’s Club: How the Transcendentalist Circle began (and how and why it ended only four years later).”
Thank you for attending my September 23rd class on “The Transcendentalists Revisited.” Click here to view the handout from last week (September 23), in which Emerson and Lydia Maria Child attempt definitions of Transcendentalism.
September 30 John told the story of the Transcendentalist Circle, which Emerson sometimes called “Hedge’s Club” – how and why it came together in 1836, what its meetings were like, and why it ceased meeting in 1840. There was a good deal of biographical background about Emerson, Hedge, and George Ripley, who may be considered the core figures in the group.
If you would like to do some reading in original sources to enrich your experience of the class, I recommend these:
Emerson’s 1837 Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard, “The American Scholar,” sometimes called “the American Intellectual Declaration of Independence.” (click here)
Emerson’s 1838 “Divinity School Address,” which one of the professors called “the latest form of infidelity,” and which made RWE the principal spokesperson for the “new views” of the Transcendentalists. (click here)
The Transcendentalists Revisited
Recorded on Sunday, September 23, 2018
Transcendentalists Revisited - Class led by Rev. Dr. John Buehrens
“Mrs. Birdseye: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s Reminiscences of W.E. Channing and the emergence of Transcendentalism in America.”
The opening session last week focused on the dramatic story of the death of Charles Follen in the burning of the Steamer Lexington on Long Island Sound, Jan. 13, 1840, and some background on the role Follen played in bringing German idealism to America. He was both Harvard’s first professor of German, 1825-1835, and taught ethics and history in the early 1830s at the Divinity School as well. Here is the Wikipedia article about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Follen
This week we turn to his friendship with the leader of American Unitarians, William Ellery Channing, and how Follen’s death impacted Channing personally and led to a demand for church reform.
If you are so inclined, I recommend reading Channing’s 1828 sermon, “Likeness to God.” http://www.americanunitarian.org/likeness.htm, which I will allude to early in my talk.