• Tuesdays, May 12 - June 9/16?, 2015 (5-6 sessions), 7:00 - 8:15 p.m.

• Emails: add to list?

• Slides: frederickuu.org/UUHistory

• $5/session, requested but not required (for UUCF Operating Fund to cover building expenses, childcare, etc. which allow these classes to be offered — not to the instructor.)

• Fall 2016?

• Banned Questions about the Bible 1 of 4,

• CSAI: Wealth Inequality,

• Ethics (Peter Singer) Covenant

• Use “I” statements: speak from your own experience.

• Ask permission before sharing other participants’ stories outside the group.

• Step-up, step-back: be conscious of the level of participation that you bring to the conversation. Allow everyone a chance to speak before you speak again.

• You always have permission to “pass.” Unitarian Roots in U.S., part 2

3 Standing Order

• Church/State relationship in colonial New England

• Towns and parishes were legally required to support public worship through taxation.

• Generally a property tax on all residents supported building/maintaining meeting houses and the minister’s salary.

• “Good” for those would benefitted (established Congregationalists)

• Onerous on Baptists, Universalists, Anglicans

• //: SCOTUS on prayer at town council meetings in Greece, New York: nytimes.com/ 2014/05/06/opinion/a-defeat-for-religious-neutrality.html First Parish Beford, MA Standing Order

• SCOTUS conservative majority: allow sectarian prayer nearly always from a Christian “chaplain of the month.” • Precedent (Kennedy): Marsh v. Chambers (1983) upheld Nebraska Legislature’s chaplain’s prayer as “deeply embedded in the history and tradition of this country.” • Dissent (Kagan): town-hall meeting “need not become a religion-free zone.” And “legislative prayer has a distinctive constitutional warrant by virtue of tradition,” dating back to the first session of Congress. • But: unlike the Nebraska case (elected legislators), the town hall meetings involved ordinary citizens, requiring “special care” to “seek to include, rather than divide” and reinforce that citizens of all faiths are equal participants in government. • Nearly all the prayers at the Greece town meetings contained purely Christian references (as in, “We acknowledge the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross”). By contrast, the chaplain in the Nebraska case, a Presbyterian minister, refrained from making references to Jesus Christ after a legislator complained. • Skirted the constitutional principle of religious neutrality and caused some residents to feel like outsiders. Dedham Decision (Baker v. Fales, 1818) [Channing’s “Unitarian Christianity” (1819)]

• Parish (all town voters): elected liberal minister • Trinitarian majority of [two!] church members (made confession of faith / assented to church covenant): disagreed (17-to15) • Custom: candidacy would end • Parish: legally contracted with minister • Ecclesiastical council (dominated by Unitarians): upheld parish’s decision • Minister ordained in October 1818 • Church: • refused to allow a liberal minister • withdrew from parish • took records, communion service, trust deeds, and securities Dedham Decision (Baker v. Fales, 1818) [Unitarian v. Trinitarian deacon] • Remaining “Minority” of Church Members: elected their own deacons and sued for return of the property (which they claimed rightly belonged to the parish)

• “Unitarian Controversy” from theology to polity (autonomy of congregation, choice of ministers, control of property)

• Verdict: Parish created the church; therefore, remnant in church should retain property. (Congregational church apart from parish has no legal existence and can’t hold property)

• Across state, liberals & orthodox declared differences. Minorities formed new societies.

• 20 years later: 1/4th of Congregational churches in Massachusetts were Unitarian. 3 Phases of Unitarian Controversy endpoint, 1825-1835

• Turning Point: May 25,1825 organization of the American Unitarian Association (AUA) • Special meeting following annual meeting of Berry Street Conference of ministers, formed 5 years earlier (door leading to vestry of Channing’s Federal St. Church on Berry St.) • [Berry Street Conference - oldest Unitarian organization still in existence.] • AUA association of individuals until 1884, after which churches could b/c members. [Channing declined presidency] • 1835: Unitarian Controversy “ended” after about thirty years with Unitarians as a community by themselves. • 1836: Emerson’s Nature & beginning of Transcendentalist Revolt! 1998

For further reading 9 Discussion Questions

• How do we know when the divine has been revealed? Is truth derived from experience or intuition? Head or heart? How do you know what is true? What role does reason play? • How do we choose to introduce children to religion? (Forrest Church and Jefferson Bible.) What stories from our history do you want to pass down? • Why don’t we do pulpit exchange more today? Movement vs. “Cult of Personalist” [Pulpit-palooza] • Compare and contrast Dedham Decision to contemporary SCOTUS on prayer at town council meetings in Greece, NY. Primary Source Discussions The Transcendentalists

(Theodore Parker next Unitarian lecture)

12 Timeline

• Second Great Awakening (c. 1790–1840) • Louisiana Purchase (1803) • Jefferson Bible (1804) • Henry Ware, Sr. appointed Professor of Divinity, Harvard (1805) [Ware Lecture] • Dedham Case (1818) • Channing preaches "Unitarian Christianity," Baltimore, MD (1819) • American Unitarian Association founded at Channing’s Federal Street Church, now Arlington Street UU in Boston (1825) —————— • 1836: Emerson’s Nature & beginning of Transcendentalist Revolt • Emerson preaches "Divinity School Address” (1838) • Parker preaches "Transient and Permanent in Christianity” (1841) • Margaret Fuller, Women in the 19th.century (1845) (d. 1850) • Seneca Falls Convention (1848) Transcendentalism

• Liberal Christian Unitarians (Channing’s Unitarian Christianity): rational biblical criticism and historical tradition

• Transcendentalists: more spiritual, seeking intense religious experience (more than cold, intellectual, formal Unitarianism as they knew it)

• David Robinson: “extenders” more than rebels • Larger Context: • Age of Reason (dry rationalism) of the Enlightenment (1650s to the 1780s) • Romantic movement (started late 18th-c., peaked 1800-1850), seeking immediate/ emotional/intuitive response to life

14 Transcendentalism

Kant: all knowledge from transcendental forms inherent in mind/consciousness (gain knowledge through intuitive/immediate experience, especially through nature)

• German Idealism, Plato’s forms (“nature”)

Contrast: John Locke’s sensationalism (knowledge through the senses)

• British Empiricism, Aristotle’s tabula rasa (“nurture”)

Caputo: “The wages of Kant are Barth, the wages of Hegel are Tillich.” [Unitarians to 3rd-person of Trinity] 15 1788 For Further Reading

16 Transcendentalism: Influences

• Groundwork laid by Channing (“Likeness to God,” “Moral Argument Against Calvinism,” etc.)…gave reading lists to the young Emerson: • human dignity/potential • indwelling God • spirituality / self-culture

• Also: • Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle • Schleiermacher (feeling/experience, father of modern liberal theology, 1799 On Religion), • Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads, Koran, Buddhist sutras, Confucius

17 Transcendentalism: Influences

• before Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) • Encountered Asian religions through texts not through practitioners • Plundered for insights for themselves more than original intent (but not necessarily doing injustice to text) • Emerson’s interest in Asian religions increased over time, Thoreau’s decreased. (Not much in Fuller.) • Later Transcendentalists: interest in universal religion based on common ethics (East-West correspondences) • [Compare: Karen Armstrong’s Ware Lecture (2011), “The Challenge of Compassion” ] 18 Colonialism

• 1783: earliest translation of Hindu texts read in U.S. by Joseph Priestley • Missionary Impulse: throughout the 19th- century, the AUA believed that within the scope of its financial limits, it should propagate its form of Christianity among those not ordinarily able to hear it. • Brahmo Samaj: monotheistic reform movement within the Hindu tradition, starting in the mid-19th century.

19 Transcendentalism

• 1829: ordained minister of Second Church in Boston, marries Ellen Tucker (Sept. 10) • 1831: Ellen dies (February 8) of tuberculosis, barely age 20. • 1832: • March 29: 28-year-old Emerson opens tomb of young wife (buried a year and two months earlier). Still writing in journals as though she was alive. • Had to see for himself firsthand (direct/ personal/unmediated, original relation to universe) • mid-July: decides to resign pulpit (trouble believing in personal immortality, Communion, historical accuracy of Bible)

20 1836: Transcendentalists’s annus mirabilis

• #1: Emerson publishes Nature, manifesto of movement: “Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have a poetry and philosophy of insight and no tradition , and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history theirs?”

• #2: first meeting of Transcendentalist Club

• #3: Alcott’s Conversations with Children on the Gospels

• #4: Brownson’s New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church

21 Transcendentalism: Miracles Controversy

• #4: Ripley publishes that Jesus’s miracles not performed to validate his teachings (and don’t have to believe in them to be a Christian)

• Andrews Norton: responded harshly out of concern for Unitarian’s reputation (miracles only evidence supporting Christian revelation) [villain or tragic?]

• 1838: Emerson’s “Divinity School Address”: everything’s a miracle (and traditional conception of miracle is “monster”)

• Norton’s The Evidence of the Genuineness of the Four Gospels published later that year. 22 George Ripley Transcendentalism: Miracles Controversy

• 1839: Norton’s “Discourse on the Latest Form of Infidelity” (before alumni association of Harvard Divinity School): miracles authenticate Christianity

• Ripley: “The Latest Form of Infidelity Examined”: merely Norton’s personal dogma [resigned pulpit in 1841]

• Continued back and forth.

• Emerson stayed above the fray.

23 Turning Point increased Public Awareness

1841 • Ripley resigned pulpit at Boston’s Purchase St. Church to found Brook Farm • Horace Greeley (a Universalist) assumed editorship of New-York Tribune (promoted reformist agenda, including Transcendentalists) 1842 • Death of Emerson’s 5-year-old Waldo to scarlet fever & Thoreau’s older brother to lockjaw • Parker’s A Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion (magnum opus of comparative religion) • Brown’s Mediatorial Life of Jesus (turn toward Roman Catholicism) • Elizabeth Peabody opened foreign-language bookstore and lending library 24 Turning Point increased Public Awareness

1854 • Arguably the literary masterpiece of the Transcendentalist movement

25 Cornell UP, 2004 U Chicago UP, 2014 26 U Chicago UP, 1992 U California UP, 1988 27 For Further Study

The Collected Works of RWE, 5 vols. to date, Harvard UP, 1971-

The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of RWE, 16 vols., Harvard UP, 1960-1982

The Letters of RWE, vol. 1-8, Columbia UP, 1939-

There’s much more!

[Irony after Divinity School Address response: (1) HUP, (2) Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Senior Lecturer in Divinity, Dan McKanan] Arc of Transcendentalism

• 1840s: Thoreau at Walden and Fuller in Rome

• Fuller’s shipwreck was in 1850 and Thoreau died in 1862 were tragic losses,

• Emerson (d. 1882) and others wrote for another two decades

29 Diverse individuals, no “center”

• James Freeman Clarke: “They called themselves ‘the club of the like-minded’; I suppose b/c no two…thought alike”

• Orestes Brownson: No single term can describe them. Nothing can be more unjust to them, or more likely to mislead the public, than to lump them all together, and predicate the same things of them all.

• Saxton: “No very precise doctrines, and without anyone band of union…. They unite to differ”

• Cabot: occasional meeting of a changing body of liberal thinkers, agreeing in nothing but their liberality”

30 Transcendentalism: What most did have in common

• New Englanders

• Harvard College

• Boston

• Unitarianism

• Rejected Calvinism in tradition of Liberal Christianity

• German Idealism over British Empiricism

31 Transcendentalism: schools of thought

Emersonian

• introspection

• self-reliance (out of Channing’s self- culture)

• “Emerson never wrote for groups or classes or institutions.” Emerson’s intended audience was always the single hearer or reader” (Richardson)

Ripley/Brownson

• “brotherhood of man”

• outward focused social reform

32 Transcendentalism: Social Reform

• Ripley and Alcott: Brook Farm and Fruitlands (utopian communities)

• Fuller: women’s rights (Phyllis Cole: “Emerson/Fuller first asked not about women’s rights but about women’s genius”)

• Parker: abolition of slavery

• Thoreau: civil disobedience [Gandhi and MLK]

• Alcott: education reform [Temple School, with Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody]

33 1848 Transcendentalist Club

• First meeting: day before Emerson’s Nature was published on September 8, 1836

• Hedge’s Club: often met when he could make the trip to Boston from Maine.

• 1837: women began to attend (picnic at Emerson’s house day after Emerson deliver “The American Scholar”)

• Met 5-6 times/year for a total of approximately 30 meetings.

• 1840: stopped meeting the year The Dial was founded

34 The Stories We (Choose to) Tell Matter

• The New York Times’ list of “100 Notable Books of 2013.”

• 2014 Pulitzer Prize in the category of Biography or Autobiography.

• More: Charles Capper’s two-volume biography of Fuller through Oxford University Press.

35 The Stories We (Choose to) Tell Matter

• When I began researching my biography of Margaret Fuller, she had virtually vanished from history. Her works had been out of print for three-quarters of a century. Her papers were hidden away in archives. She rarely if ever appeared in dissertations or monographs….

• What a difference a few decades make! [2nd-wave feminism]

• [S]he is now grouped with Emerson and Thoreau as the “big Transcendentalist three”…. She is the focus every year of whole chapters in dozens of dissertations and monographs….

36 The Stories We (Choose to) Tell Matter

• Raised not on Bible stories, but on the classic Greek and Roman myths

• [c.f. her “Conversations”: “stories of Greek and Roman vitality rather than to parables of Christian piety and submission”]

• described herself as a “child of masculine energy,” but lived in the first-half of the 19th-century, an age of men in suits and women in puffy-sleeves and corsets [expected to “marry well” as height of achievement]

• Tutored younger siblings when should have been part of the Harvard class of 1829 with James Freeman Clarke and others.

37 The Stories We (Choose to) Tell Matter

• Got permission to use the Harvard library to research her first book,

• Summer on the Lakes, sold better than Emerson’s first book Nature

38 Fuller’s “Conversations”

• “undefended by rouge or candlelight”

• dispense with the pointless, artificial conventions of feminine parlor chat — ‘digressing into personalities or commonplaces,’ in a word, gossip

• require “simple and clear effort for expression”

• “Soon 25 women had bought $10 tickets for an initial 13-week series (~ two-thirds Emerson’s rate)

• Caroline Healey Dall: women’s rights activist (especially for equal work opportunities), wrote account of the conversations (and a history of Transcendentalism)

39 1845

• “first significant work to take ‘the liberal side in the question of “Women’s Rights” since Mary Wollstonecraft,” A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

• “We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man”

• “There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”

• [To Emerson: “O these tedious, tedious attempts to learn the universe by thought alone” (letter). “You are intellect, I am life” (in person)]

40 Rome

• Fell in love with Giovanni Ossoli (an Italian man aged twenty-seven to her thirty-seven), had a child, and later married

• All three died in shipwreck only 300 yards from the U.S. shore on their trip home from Europe

• Fuller was only forty years old, and at the height of powers and potential.

• Emerson and others wrote the first bestselling biography about her: The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.

41 “Literature, Philosophy, & Religion” Quarterly, 1840-1844 (named after “sundial”)

• Purpose: “freest expression of thought” on most important questions of the day (future not past, living soul not dead letter)

• Fuller b/c the 23-year-old Thoreau’s first editor: “hoped to publish the essay eventually, but while it was ‘rich in thoughts,’ in its present form those thoughts ‘seem to me so out of their natural order, that I cannot read it through without pain’”

• Emerson b/c editor after two years.

• Influential, but commercial failure.

42 Peabody Sisters

• Mary - teacher; married Horace Mann, public school reformer

• Sophia - painter; married Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Elizabeth

• as young girl, heard Channing preach (transcribed about 50 of his sermons)

• Teacher at Alcott’s Temple School

• Her bookshop hosted Fuller’ first “Conversations,” where the Ripleys planned for Brook Farm, she was also a publisher

• Founded of the kindergarten movement in America

43 Brook Farm U-topian Social Hopes [Thomas More (1516)]

• Purpose: “inspire a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor… to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life”

• Nostalgia: bucolic retreat. Days began with choral Mozart and Haydn, afternoons interrupted to read Dante in Italian, and evenings with dramatic tableaux, lectures, and dancing.

• Ethical imperative, not economic necessity

• Deep faith in individual potential and social perfectibility (“Likeness to God”) (1841-1847) 44 U-topian Social Hopes

• Also: desperation from unrelieved financial pressure, loss of faith in leadership, class antagonisms.

• Ripley’s 14 years as a Unitarian minister prepared for neither the demanding physical work of running a farm nor the logistics of agriculture on a former 200- acre dairy farm. (Had been dairy farm previously b/c relative sterility of soil made it unsuitable for other kinds of farming.)

• Ripley was 38-years old. No previous business/farming experience.

• [Parker lived only two miles away, but never joined; his hope/focus was on reform through transforming the institution of the church.] (1841-1847) 45 U-topian Social Hopes

• Alcott’s Fruitland one of the most abysmal failures of utopian communities in the 1840s.

• Lasted six months (June 1, 1843 - mid-January 1844)

Yale UP, 2011 46 U-topian Social Hopes

• Also compare

• much more successful Hopedale Community

• founded by Adin Ballou (Universalist)

• based on the “Standard of Practical Christianity”

• 1842-1856 OSU UP, 1992

47 Context

• 119 communal/utopian societies established in the U.S. between 1800-1859, more than half during the 1840s.

• Of the sixty formed during the 1840s, only five were in New England, four of those in Massachusetts. Brook Farm (1841-1847) was the first to be organized

• Nearly thirty Fourierist communities were formed in the U.S. in the 1840s, but Brook Farm was the only Fourierist experience ever established in New England.

48 U-topian Social Hopes

• 1845: reorganized under the principles of French socialist Charles Fourier

• 1846: The Phalanstery, the central residence building, burned down while under construction (uninsured)

• 1847: disbanded after six years

• Overall: bad financial judgement and poor location

• Most immediate: smallpox outbreak (November 1845) causing students to dwindle, Phalanstery burning (March 1846) (1841-1847) 49 U-topian Social Hopes

• Open door policy led to too much expansion too soon.

• School was the community’s only source of steady income

• Under appreciated that Brook Farm had three college-educated teachers in school

• No other antebellum New England communities had more than one college- educated person in their educational program

(1841-1847) 50 Transcendentalist Legacy

• Cosmic Optimism: “If you told the modern American that he is totally depraved, he would think you were joking…convinced that he always had been, and ways will be, victorious and blameless” —Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” (1911)

• Individualism: “If truth is what an individual finds congruent with his experience rather than a deeply shared social ideal, individual triumphs, as it did in the Gilded Age and beyond.”

• [c.f. Rorty’s Achieving Our Country]

51 Legacy: All Souls Unitarian, Tulsa

10:00am Traditional Worship Service [“Liberal Christian”] • forward-looking, rational, scientific worldview combined with a deep respect for the wisdom of the world's great religions. • Language of reverence that speaks of God in ways that leaves room for multiple and metaphorical meanings to be discovered. 11:30am Contemporary Worship [“Transcendentalist”] • fusion of inclusive, philosophy of religious freedom with God-centered worship. (Gospel, Praise, Pentecostal and Popular music and also occasional Classical, Jazz and R&B songs.) • For those who seek not only a free and intellectual, exploration of God, but also an energetic, embodied experience of God. 11:30am The Point [“Humanist”]: Love Beyond Belief • No robes, no hymns, no prayers or scriptures. Just a relevant message, inspiring music by Rick Fortner and friends, and a community committed to the common good. Join us on this journey of depth and discovery. 52 Discussion Questions:

• In his Divinity School Address, Emerson said that religion should be a “vital personal experience”? To what extent do his words describe your own religious faith and practice? • Channing, Priestley, and others based their Unitarian beliefs on their interpretation of the Bible. Transcendentalists Emerson, Fuller, and Parker offered a radical departure from Bible-based Christianity. What role does the Bible play in your religious life? Do you find your ideas about the Bible reflected in the ideas of our forebears? • Parker preached that the teachings of Jesus are "permanent" because they are self-evident, true, and not reliant on the divinity of Jesus to make them so, whereas the forms and the doctrines of Christianity are "transient." What is "permanent" for you about religion and religious practice? What is "transient"? uua.org/careers/ministers/becoming/16224.shtml (Required Reading List…also see recommended)

Primary Source Discussion #4: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Divinity School Address” (1839)

Primary Source Discussion #6: Theodore Parker, “The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity” (1841)

54