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Unless a Seed Falls: Cultivating Liberal Institutions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2010
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I have inherited a paradox. As the inaugural holder of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association chair, I am accountable in some sense to a man who once told the graduates of this school to “cast behind [them] all conformity” to what they had learned at school, relying on themselves rather than on the institutions of “historical Christianity.” But I am also accountable to one of those institutions—indeed, to the very denominational tradition that Emerson was leaving behind when he urged our students to “acquaint men at first hand with deity.”1 This level of institutional accountability in a Harvard chair has few precedents. Among my colleagues, only Francis Schussler Fiorenza has the name of a denomination in his title, and while the Charles Chauncy Stillman chair of Roman Catholic studies may contain its own paradoxes, I am guessing that the pope was not as intimately involved in its creation as Unitarian Universalist president Bill Sinkford was in the funding of the Emerson chair.
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References
1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Divinity School Address,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (8 vols.; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1971) 1:90.
2 Throughout this essay, I will be using the term “religious liberalism” in the way it is typically used among Unitarian Universalists. In this sense, it is a generic term that includes all those religious traditions that place first emphasis on such values as individual spiritual freedom, the use of reason, and tolerance for diversity, and that eschew any setting of “orthodox” boundaries around religious communities. I recognize that there is another sort of liberalism that is not defined over against orthodoxy, but thrives within doctrinally defined religious communities. I leave it up to those who are liberal in that sense to discern the extent to which my argument might apply to them and their communities.
3 C. Conrad Wright, “Henry Bellows and the Organization of the National Conference,” in The Liberal Christians: Essays on American Unitarian History (Boston: Beacon, 1970) 81–109.
4 James Luther Adams, “Freedom and Association,” in On Being Human Religiously (ed. Max L. Stackhouse; Boston: Beacon, 1976) 55–85.
5 Emerson, “Self Reliance,” in Collected Works, 2:29, 35.
6 Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal, 17 October 1840, in The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks (ed. William Henry Gilman et al.; 16 vols.; Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1960–) 7:407–8.
7 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, “A Glimpse of Christ's Idea of Society,” The Dial 2 (October 1841) 228, 224–25.
8 For a thorough account of how the religious free market both did and did not express democratic idealism, see Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
9 George Ripley to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 9 November 1840, in Autobiography of Brook Farm (ed. Henry W. Sams; Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1958) 6. For more on Peabody, see Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005); and Bruce A. Ronda, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). On Brook Farm, see Sterling Delano, Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2004); and Carl Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991).
10 Peabody, “A Glimpse,” 214, 215.
11 Ibid., 216, 220–21, 217, 226.
12 Ibid., 217–18.
13 Elizabeth Peabody, “Plan of the West Roxbury Community,” The Dial 2 (January 1842): 362–64, 368; and Peabody, “A Glimpse,” 228.
14 Peabody, “Plan,” 370–71.
15 Ralph Waldo Emerson to Thomas Carlyle, 30 October 1840, in The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson (ed. Charles E. Norton; 2 vols.; London: Chatto and Windus, 1883) 1:308–9.
16 Edward K. Spann, Hopedale: From Commune to Company Town, 1840–1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992).
17 Adin Ballou, History of the Hopedale Community: From Its Inception to Its Virtual Submergence in the Hopedale Parish (ed. William S. Heywood; Lowell, Mass.: Thompson & Hill/The Vox Populi Press, 1897) 13.
18 “Standard of Practical Christianity,” in Ballou, History, 3–8.
19 Peabody, “A Glimpse,” 31.
20 “The West Roxbury Community,” Practical Christian 3 (3 September 1842) 31.
21 Adin Ballou, “Sectarianism,” Practical Christian 3 (25 June 1842) 10.
22 Adin Ballou, “Sect, Sectarian, Sectarianism,” Practical Christian 4 (20 January 1844) 70.
23 Ibid., 74.
24 Ballou, History, 289–91.
25 Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Memoir of William Henry Channing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886) 225.
26 Elizabeth Peabody, “The Dorian Measure, with a Modern Application,” Aesthetic Papers (Boston: The Editor, 1849) 64–111.
27 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, “Letters on Religion in America, No. 2,” Christian Register 24 (13 September 1845). The entire series ran from 6 September 1845 to 11 April 1846.
28 Elizabeth Peabody, “Fourierism,” The Dial 4 (April 1844) 482.
29 On Holmes, see I Speak for Myself: The Autobiography of John Haynes Holmes (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959) and Carl Hermann Voss, Rabbi and Minister: The Friendship of Stephen S. Wise and John Haynes Holmes (2d ed.; Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1980).
30 John Haynes Holmes, New Churches for Old: A Plea for Community Religion (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1922) 173.
31 John Haynes Holmes, The Revolutionary Function of the Modern Church (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912) 177, 178, 181.
32 Holmes, The Revolutionary Function, 200, 205, 213, 206, 207–8, 223.
33 Holmes, New Churches, vii-viii.
34 Ibid., viii, 211, 220.
35 Ibid., 97, 27, 63.
36 Ibid., 71–72.
37 Ibid., 189–90, 212, 210.
38 Ibid., 299.
39 Holmes, I Speak, 287.
40 John 12:24.
41 Ballou, History, 291–93.
42 Cited in Holmes, New Churches, 341.
43 For the published version of this passage, see Touching the World: Christian Communities Transforming Society (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2007) 155.
44 Mary White Ovington, Black and White Sat Down Together: The Reminiscences of an NAACP Founder (New York: Feminist Press, 1995) 4.
45 Carolyn Wedin, Inheritors of the Spirit: Mary White Ovington and the Founding of the NAACP (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998) 105–11. Wedin's assessment of Ovington's centrality reflects the appropriate fondness of the biographer. For other accounts of the NAACP's founding, see Manfred Berg, “The Ticket to Freedom”: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2005); and Gilbert Jonas, Freedom's Sword: The NAACP and the Struggle against Racism in America, 1909–1969 (New York: Routledge, 2005).
46 Ovington, Black and White, 21–22, 24–25. For DuBois's own account of the Tuskegee Machine, see W. E. B. DuBois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (new introduction by Irene Diggs; Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1983) 69–74.
47 Wedin, Inheritors, 137–44.
48 Cited in Wedin, Inheritors, 141.
49 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fourierism and the Socialists,” The Dial 3 (July 1842) 88.
50 Emerson, “Divinity School Address,” 76.